Johannes Kreidler hopes to question the concept of music copyright with a 33-second song called "Product Placements" that includes no fewer than 70,200 samples — each of which must be cleared in order for the song (listen below) to be legally released.

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This will entail delivering 70,200 forms to German copyright authorities, which Kreidler intends to do on September 12 as a sort of performance art project to address copyright issues.

In the video to the right, Kreidler calls a representative of GEMA (Gesellschaft für Musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte, which translates loosely as "sound recording and mechanical duplication rights society" — somewhat like a German version of BMI or ASCAP) and casually asks that the blank forms be sent to his house, then lays out his objective.

"All creative work uses third-party material," Kreidler claims in the video’s English translation. "Given that the internet has made music instantaneously available on a massive, global scale, and that the progress of new, never-before-heard musical material in avant-garde music has reached its end, the ‘product placements’ performance aims to highlight the fact that certain questions arise perforce in connection with sound: Who has ownership?"

Kreidler goes on to explain that he hopes to demonstrate that current copyright law makes no distinction between legal and aesthetic ownership.

The piece can be heard via YouTube in the video to the right. It’s not the most listenable thing we’ve ever heard, but could have been worse. Kreidler points out that the theoretical limit on sampling in a song recorded at the standard CD quality of 44.1 kHz is 44,100 samples per second. (At that point, each sample could be expressed mathematically as a number.)

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(via P2P Blog)