A reminder to the RIAA

At the Inauguration four great musicians performed a remix of a classic Shaker work song or hymn called Simple Gifts. It was remixed by John Williams - who is a pretty famous composer. Williams wrote an introduction and then some variations to a very familiar tune that dates to the 19th century. My quibble with this musical event is not with Williams using a common theme - there are thousands of examples of that kind of remixing across the wide range of music. But in the current environment had a young person taken one of John William's compositions from one of his films and remixed it in the same way that Williams took this classic melody - you can be sure that either Sony (who has a lot of his music) or the RIAA would go after that young person.

Lawrence Lessig, in a relatively new book called Remix explains why the current copyright regime is destructive and ultimately doomed to failure. In the end, we enjoyed the performance at the inauguration yesterday but it was clearly something that had it been presented in a slightly different genre would have generated a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo.