Illegal art? RIAA takes mashup site offline
MashupTown, a site that hosts and distributes mashups (two or more songs ingeniously mixed together to make a third) has taken down all of its files after complaints from the RIAA to its web hoster.
BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow writes:
Mashups are a really dumb target for the RIAA. There’s just no universe in which someone who downloads a mashup of Prince’s 1999 and the Benny Goodman orchestra performing “In the Mood” thinks, Well, now I’ve heard that, I have no need to buy the CDs those songs originated on. In other words, if the RIAA genuinely only goes after its customers because it wants to keep from losing sales, attacking mashups won’t and can’t accomplish that. This action amounts to the RIAA saying, “This art is illegal because it displeases us.”
Another case of someone strangling creativity for the sake of a business model that does not work anymore. The MashupTown guys are considering to move the site to Russia and ask anyone who knows of a good web hoster there to please tell them.
via BoingBoing