Weird Al was nice enough to ask Lady Gaga if he could so this, but the fame-drunk starlet said no, and hence the song will be kept off his next album. No, this isn’t an IP problem as such – satire is legal, thank goodness, for whatever reason – but it illustrates the absurdities that the culture of IP has instilled in artists. The very notion that they imagine themselves as the sole owner of something like ubiquitous song – inherently malleable and infinitely distributable – is preposterous on its face. The ideal of art in the past was that it be owned by the whole world. IP manages to reverse the ideal.
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