Image credit: Ralf ???????’s “Damon in front – Sled Dogs in Wallgau Bavaria”
While editing the point-of-view video Miles took while he and his friend Ruggiero were sledding, I was thinking of a soundtrack. Given we were in Sud Tyrol I was toying with Kraftwerk’s fun fun fun on the “Autobahn.” Too slow. And then considered Depeche Mode’s “Never Let me Down Again.” Too British. And then I started thinking about the 3 strikes policy on Vimeo for uploading copyrighted material (and the fact I already have 2), I quickly reconsidered. I don’t exactly want to lose my Vimeo account just yet, so I started browsing around the Free Music Archive for songs with the term Sled in them. I found a band called Snowboarder out of San Francisco that has a song called “Sled Dogs.” I gave it a listen, and it was perfect. I added it to the video, and it is now a cinematic masterpiece of epic proportions, like everything I create.
Moral of this trite story? As much as I love to break copyright online, having the ability to quickly search and discover a perfect song openly licensed through the Free Music Archive was pretty awesome too. I still refuse to give into the licensing rhetoric entirely because so much of the pop culture material we are forbidden to re-use and critique is antithetical to a free-thinking culture. But for a brief moment it almost made me want to stop uploading copyrighted material, but then I got my wits about me 🙂
