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The Illegal Art Exhibit site, an incidental home of the DJ Danger Mouse remix project The Grey Album, mixes its message. What they do would ultimately suffocate freedom of expression by taking away the incentive protection offers to the creative.
The exhibit also neglects the two most famous examples of unauthorised use, one good, one evil:
(1) The Air Pirates, whose unauthorised underground comix published in 1971 tweaked an evil empire, Disney, whose legal response has been a commonly-cited case throughout the comics and mainstream media for years (it was even recently documented in a book, The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture), and
(2) The once-ubiquitous decals of Calvin urinating on the logo of an interchangeable auto manufacturer.
In the first case, Dan O’Neill has since claimed that the entire episode was a ploy to regain the copyright to his strip Odd Bodkins from The San Francisco Chronicle, which is why he considers it a victory.
The second is certainly more famous than The Grey Album. Bill Waterson refused to license the characters from his creation Calvin & Hobbes for fear that the world he created would be diluted and quickly rendered meaningless, resulting in the strip becoming a mere commercial. In spite of this decision, bootleggers began creating unauthorised Calvin & Hobbes products, including the decal seen on nearly every Ford/Chevrolet truck I’ve been stuck behind in traffic for the past 11 years.
In no way has this re-imagining of Calvin enriched my enjoyment of the source material. It’s simply crass. This is also unfortunately true of much of the Illegal Art Exhibit. There is little revolutionary in the works displayed. The results are simply parasitic; meaningless without the use of someone else’s ideas. They only demean, and in many instances they demean the good, not the ungodly.
The Grey Album is the joker in the Illegal Art deck, since malice on the part of its creator was never evident, but even with Jay-Z’s likely blessing, I doubt if either of the two surviving composers of the White Album were approached for their consent, which is the true issue at the bottom of the argument. The primary protection for works of art should go to the creator, or some protection should be awarded the creator or his or her successors in interest, simply because uncreative people are envious and will do anything to usurp your reputation to enhance theirs. The EFF, which I had presumed would have known better, issued a spurious analysis of the case which demonstrated an obvious lack of research. (It is hardly unclear, for example, “who owns the rights to the George Harrison songs” on The Beatles.)
Besides, the most recent site update claims that “an unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in which the soundtrack is substituted with a voice-over by Brad Neely by means of syncing the DVD with a different audio recording is “an as-of-yet-unnamed new art form.” It’s not. It’s the exact same thing people have been doing with The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for years, which shows that the Illegal Art staff don’t get around very much.
