Dub dot dash

Flattering, says Danger Mouse.
DJ Danger Mouse's official response to Grey Tuesday is here. For some background on Danger Mouse, check out this interview at allhiphop.com. He's been doing the mashup thing for a while now.. "I put out about three other 12” of things I did where I was mixing like Suzanne Vega with 50 Cent, Nas and Portishead and stuff like that...."
The New York Times reports that "By yesterday afternoon (Tuesday) some of the web masters of the protesting sites said they had served 85 to 100 copies of the album, while other reported as many as 1,000 downloads." So, its gone from 3000 cds to potentially 75,000 to 100,000 copies in circulation in one day by my estimate. Grey Tuesday say that "we are certain the Grey Album was the number one album in the country yesterday (by a huge margin). Danger Mouse moved more 'units' than Norah Jones and Kanye West, and the Grey Album easily went gold in a day, with well over 100,000 copies downloaded. That's more than 1 million digital tracks."
EMI could have licensed the record, got it in the shops and be making money off it, instead of making money for their lawyers. 'Cept the Beatles are well known for saying no to anyone wanting to sample their music.

More from the NYT... "Jonathan Zittrain, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said the issue is indeed a gray one. "As a matter of pure legal doctrine, the Grey Tuesday protest is breaking the law, end of story," Mr. Zittrain said. "But copyright law was written with a particular form of industry in mind. The flourishing of information technology gives amateurs and home-recording artists powerful tools to build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable art drawn from pieces of popular culture. There's no place to plug such an important cultural sea change into the current legal regime."