Law School Program to Examine Pop Music, DJs and Copyright Law

Yale Law School will host "Digital Mix," the 2004 Payson Wolff Lecture on Law and Music, on December 10, 6:30-11 p.m., in the Levinson Auditorium, 127 Wall Street.

Yale Law School will host “Digital Mix,” the 2004 Payson Wolff Lecture on Law and Music, on December 10, 6:30-11 p.m., in the Levinson Auditorium, 127 Wall Street.

The program will include performances and discussions that explore DJ music in an era of tough digital copyright laws. Admission is free and open to the public.

DJ Spooky, a virtuoso disk jockey, and Mark Hosler, founding member of the band Negativland, will perform and discuss their art. Mike Godwin, legal director of the non-profit association Public Knowledge and an advocate of the public interest in information policy, will speak on recent legislative attacks on DJ culture. Activist Nelson Pavlosky, founder of the Free Culture campus movement, will talk about the efforts of students nationwide to organize and support democratic policies toward popular culture.

“The event will provoke not only artistic reflection, but a re-examination of how law and music can evolve together,” said Eddan Katz, executive director of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and co-organizer of the event. “Rooted in the digital appropriation of sound samples and image clips, DJ music takes shape in conflict with the legal regime of copyright not yet comfortably adapted to the digital age.”

“It’s important to see what’s at stake in these digital ‘copyright wars,’” said Sarah Brown, the strategic policy advisor at Public Knowledge and co-organizer of the event. “Overly strong copyright law doesn’t just achieve the content industry’s aim of stopping illegitimate piracy, it also threatens legitimate genera of American art based on creative sampling, collage and re-mixing culture.”

The lectureship, created to honor Law School alumnus Payson R. Wolff, one of the leading entertainment lawyers of his generation, is intended to explore the complex questions of intellectual property, especially as they pertain to the music business.

The event is also sponsored by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, created in 1997 to study the implications of the new information technologies on law and society; Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy and education organization that seeks to promote a balanced approach to intellectual property law and technology policy; and the New Haven Advocate.

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Media Contact

Gila Reinstein: gila.reinstein@yale.edu, 203-432-1325