/ Cory Doctorow / 8:44 am Fri Jun 21, 2013

Beastles get nuked by the RIAA - the merciless, indiscriminate boot of Big Content stamps on humanity's face, forever


Remember The Beastles, the amazing Beastie Boys/Beatles mashup? Hope you got a copy on your hard-drive because the RIAA's gone on a totally predictable jihad against a piece of delightful, noncommercial creativity.

Tim sez, "RIAA and Universal are pulling dj BC's Beastles across the web. Radio Clash has gotten a nastygram from the RIAA, Mega has pulled a mirror and also the Soundcloud has been disabled. In fact on his Facebook page, dj BC has announced pulling down the links tonight! It's amazing that in this day and age that a non-commercial fair-use project is still being stomped on by the blue meanies. Looking to see how I should respond...but also looking for a new host in Russia, although how that is better post-PRISM I'm not sure :-/"

Sorry, Tim, Russia just passed its own SOPA on steroids.

Cease and Desist Mark 2: Beastles gets pulled by the blue meanies

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    1. It’s not quite streaming but now you can play video and sound through vlc as your client downloads sequential chunks of the torrent. Usually have to wait a minute as it ‘buffers’ but, yeah, streaming pretty much.

  2. It’s amazing that in this day and age that a non-commercial fair-use project is still being stomped on by the blue meanies.

    ???

    I’d love to live in your reality. Please send driving directions!

      1. I suspect it may be a reference to the “It’s amazing” part. I too would want to live in a reality where this is amazing instead of sadly status quou

        1. I like dj BC have been doing mashups for some time: 10 years here. It’s not ‘amazing’ because OMG HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN??!!!111, this ia not my first Cease & Desist. It’s amazing because the same record companies use remixers and mashup producers to promote their tracks on the downlow. Or with remix competitions, or even paid gigs. Complete hypocrisy…we don’t steal the acapellas or instrumentals usually, they are released by the labels. But woe betide if you actually *use* them.

        2. I suspect it may be a reference to the “It’s amazing” part. I too would want to live in a reality where this is amazing instead of sadly status
          quou

          Yes, that’s the part I was referring to. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.

          1. Ultimately, though, it is pointless to respond to sarcasm with sarcasm. It is almost like you did not get it?

  3. Oh, they can’t really remove it. They just make themselves look like haters, meanwhile I’m sure I can find a downloadable copy within 30 seconds were I to go look.

  6. I dunno though, maybe there is something to not being able to take other people’s music and call it your own just because you synced a beat…

    1.  Wait, who made it?  I still don’t know.  It’s called “The Beastles” which seems to give credit to both The Beatles and The Beastie Boys but I’d guess if the creator was attention whoring I might know his name by now.

      It’s Tim something I guess?

      1. No I’m that ‘Tim something’ and I’m just mirroring the album, dj BC is the creator. But he’s pulling the links from thebeastles.com too after legal threats. Heard beastiesremix is down too.

        1. Thanks! 

          Hopefully that will teach this naughty dj BC person for  trying to make the world a more fun and interesting place by remixing music we’ve all heard already.

          /s

          1.  Oh again? I mean I have all this power of ultimate destruction through gay marriage, and now mashups too? Sheesh. Power Corrupts Absolutely Playtime!

          2. We already have the power to unleash tornadoes, earthquakes and floods just by committing a bit of occasional sodomy.

      2. The saddest part is both the remaining Beatles and the remaining Beasties might not object – they might even love the project – but the RIAA is going to protect those artists to the death. Also, some corporations maybe.

    2. Except that it doesn’t belong to anyone…. In the constitution we give people exclusive rights for a short while STRICTLY as an incentive for future  works… but 50 years later? Fuck no.

      Yes there are laws. Same laws that make you have to pay the dipshits that hold the rights to “Happy Birthday” or Christmas. Bought and paid for laws, that have nothing to do with the will of the people.

      Laws passed by a congress so deeply intermingled with big corporations that they are indistinguishable.  Same laws that are subject to copyright so you don’t get to know what they are.

      When its obvious that our intellectual property law is crafted by corporate interests and pushed through in secret legislative cabals, etc… why do we still discuss it like it matters?

      At this point, the question is, can they enforce their bought laws? If not then ignore them. If so then take it farther then they are willing to go.

    1. I’m grabbing three from mirrors now. I’m sure the worst google-fu will still find others.

  9. I suspect you all misunderstand what happened here.  This looks more like a mistaken, and run-of-the-mill piracy takedown letter than a “this isn’t fair use!  Don’t remix our work!” letter.  Most likely, the crawling algorithm picked up a bit of Beatles (or Beastie Boys) content, and flagged it as an illegal file.

    This is an important distinction: they think the file is illegally hosted, not that the work was illegally created.  This is because their algorithms do the searching for them, and some entry-level associate is hired to send out form letters to all of the sites that come up.

    This is still a problem, for sure, where creativity is chilled when untrained employees sent un(legally)trained artists scary letters based on an imperfect content recognition system.  Still a problem, yes, but not the “squashing the artist” kind of problem you all think.

    1.  After reading the letter I think you’re right.  The weird thing is that after a couple readings I can’t find anywhere that the legal representative of the RIAA claims any legal relationship with the owner of the rights to the music.  I guess that’s just how they do it, but….still weird.

      There was a copyright decision recently (just searched, couldn’t find it unfortunately) in which the judge focused on the financial impact the “fair-use work” had on the underlying, original work.  I really think that analysis needs to replace the current analyses used in most circuits. 

      Given, as someone above points out, that U.S. law doesn’t recognize any all encompassing, god given right to control what you create, the question should be “What financial damage has this use of the original work done to the creator or rights holder?”  The answer in this case would almost certainly be “none at all”; no one is going to forego a purchase of either a Beatles or Beastie Boys album or song because they can listen to The Beastles instead. 

      As pointed out above, if anything it will help sales of the underlying original works, and the truth of that statement can be borne out by the use of such adaptive works by rights holders themselves for marketing purposes.

      1.  In other instances, they have examined the effect that the new work has on the original owner’s ability to license the work to other creators.  This, of course, is ridiculous, as it is like the original owner selling someone their own right to fair use (over which the original owner had no control in the first place).  That kind of licensing is an owner selling something he does not even control, so the fact that it ends up in the analysis is absurd.

        1.  This isn’t the first C&D I’ve had, they’re all pretty much the same form-letter stuff. It sounds autocreated – because it is. DMCA is an automated process – but still someone pushes the button, and I’ve had many other things ‘not’ get this kind of treatment, maybe because they weren’t as big as Beastles but I suspect on an automated infringement level that wouldn’t count.

          tl;dr: You don’t get a scented letter with xxxx at the end ;-)

  11. i am shocked, SHOCKED at this action taken by the RIAA! who would ever have seen this coming??

  12. Dang.  I saw the previous post about the Beastles at work, and thought: “Oh. I should remember to download that when I get home before the RIAA gets to it”.  Then I forgot, and now it’s gone.

    Oh well, I’ll just go to the pirate bay.  Because at least North Korea will defend freedom of expression.

  15. I wonder why the RIAA didn’t go nuclear like this when Beatallica first came out. I know Sony went after them, but that was somehow resolved without the RIAA getting involved.

    1.  They did, Lars Ulrich had to step in to defend Beatallica as I remember – although as you say that was vs Sony. Pretty crazy that it took the band themselves saying ‘this is cool’ before the label would back off!

  16. Just downloaded from Mirror 6 (thebeastles.com). It doesn’t appear to be on PB yet, but that’s probably because the mirrors made PB moot. Until this happened.

  18. Anyone have a link for the first two? I managed to grab this one when it first appeared but no such luck finding the others.

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