Hip-hop, like jazz, is an art of reconstruction. Beats, rhymes and life coalesce from many to one to form a distinct art. And through the decades, although technology has changed beat-making and culture has changed the rhymes, the music has remained largely the same.

In this tradition of artistic collage, a DJ named Brian Burton (a.k.a. Danger Mouse) has created The Grey Album. Combining Jay-Z’s rhymes from The Black Album with music from the Beatles’ White Album and a few original beats, Danger Mouse’s work is “hip-hop meets technological determinism” — and way beyond two turntables and a microphone.

Paired with a new musical background, Jay-Z sounds fresh and brilliant (I guess the Beatles will do that). Danger Mouse has taken an aging player’s mediocre swan song to new levels of sophistication, replacing The Black Album‘s flat, uninteresting beats with harmonic interest and intensity. “What More Can I Say” meets “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on what is perhaps the song that makes best use of both Jay-Z’s and the Beatles’ contributions to the project. Unfortunately, the rhymes are mostly dedicated to posturing, diminishing the musical impact of an otherwise stellar track.

Both Black and White have been reviewed countless times, and there is only so much one can say, in musical terms, about combining the two. Fortunately, the music is really the least interesting part of this story.

In early February, Danger Mouse achieved international notoriety with the release of The Grey Album, not so much for the music, but for the cease-and-desist letters sent by EMI, the record label that holds the copyright to The White Album.

The problem, from EMI’s perspective, is that Danger Mouse did not have permission to sample the Beatles’ music. Under current law, musicians and producers must negotiate a usage agreement if they wish to use another artist’s music in their work. These agreements are hard to come by, especially if you are a little-known artist (like Danger Mouse) or you want to sample someone really popular (like the Beatles).

Record companies have music locked up, and keys are only available to those with deep pockets.

Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2004, a music activism group called Downhill Battle organized Grey Tuesday, “a day of coordinated civil disobedience.” Hundreds of websites participated in the online protest, mostly by offering The Grey Album for download or changing their color scheme to gray for a day.

These online activists were protesting EMI’s attempts to censor The Grey Album, which is, by most accounts, a brilliant piece of work and artistically respectful to both the Beatles’ and Jay-Z. Moreover, Danger Mouse’s album caused no financial harm to any of the parties involved, and (let’s be honest) the “money thing” is why copyright laws are such a big deal.

Historically, the federal government has struggled to balance the wants of a few with the rights of many. Intellectual-property laws, which arose to protect an individual’s ideas and to keep undeserving parties from capitalizing on these achievements, have developed into a comfy back-pocket arrangement between government and large-scale copyright holders. Motivation to change copyright laws is hard to muster when music-industry lobbyists crowd the Capitol and media companies are some of the world’s largest corporations.

Coupled with heavily restrictive and inappropriate copyright laws, “the record industry has become a huge drag on creativity,” says Downhill Battle. What would happen if intellectual-property laws were loosened up a bit?

Imagine a system where, for nonprofit uses, artists could sample any existing musical work for their projects. The nonprofit stipulation would protect independent artists from having their work stolen by big companies and would at least keep the bootlegging and piracy situation from getting worse.

For commercial uses, compulsory licensing (where usage fees are paid to copyright holders but case-by-case permission doesn’t need to be granted) could be adapted to make sample clearance a painless, fair and affordable process.

These suggestions (which are by no means original to me) are an attempt to reignite musical creativity by freeing up culture and releasing so-called illegal art into public. “The Grey Album is only one of the thousands of legitimate and valuable efforts that have been stifled by the record industry — not to mention the ones that were never even attempted because of the current legal climate,” Downhill Battle says.

Far from the radical pipe dream many have described to characterize Grey Tuesday and the Grey Album fight, this is a protest anchored in common sense. The Beatles certainly haven’t lost any sales because of Danger Mouse and in fact have likely sold a few extra copies. Jay-Z understands the benefits of releasing musical material into the public — he offers an a cappella version of The Black Album to encourage remixes. The Grey Album must be having some effect. But if no one is losing any money, any fans or any credibility, then what is happening?

More art is happening. So much of human artistic expression is in the reinterpretation of existing work, and increasing that body of source material encourages further creative development by artists.

As weblog writer Jason Kottke said of Grey Tuesday: “Instead of locking creativity up, I say set it free and see what happens.” It sounds simple, because it is.

On Grey Tuesday, johnzeratsky.com went gray in protest.