Above is the trailer for “Sonic Outlaws” ( go to UBUWEB to see it in its full one and a half hours glory!) by Craig Baldwin, an excellent mish mash of found footage and different film medias used to discuss sampling and copyright infringement.  This was released back in 1995 and features a great scene with Negativland talking to U2’s The Edge on a radio show about having their ass sued by U2’s own lawyers for their infamous U2 track, a track that before the times of Youtube was nigh on impossible to hear. The Edge’s proclamations of innocence are pretty funny.

In fact in the 90s, this film could only been seen in festivals and I remember that in 1997  I was programming the cinema programme for Sonar Festival in Barcelona and I booked this film so I could actually see it as I had heard so much about it.

If we move on to 10 years later and we still have the same discussion in “Good Copy Bad Copy” another fine documentary from 2007 with lots of people saying sensible things about the future of copyright and some people saying some not so sensible things – guess which ones will have jobs in the near future. Not so sure about using Girl Talk as the best example of cut and paste, but he seems harmless enough as he taps away at his laptop.

The whole film can be viewed here, and in my opinion both films are well worth watching and prove that this discussion needs to be resolved soon.

If you are a fluent Portuguese reader you might want to download the above book for free as a PDF file. It is a comprehensive study of the Tecnobrega phenomenam from the far North-East of Brazil, amazon country. Tecnobrega could have been Brazil’s next baile funk, i.e. an exportable exotic ghettotech, but is in fact far too cheesy for most tastes. However, what is interesting about Tecnobrega is its self-sustained business model and that it is a soundsystem based music, almost entirely based in the neighborhoods of the Belém do Pará outskirts.

I have started reading the book on my laptop and it is a fascinating piece of research.

There is an overview of the book in English here.

and you can download the PDF file here.

The documentary “Good Copy, Bad Copy” about tecnobrega is well worth watching as well. Below is a clip: