If the people at NASA can make something good from both of those shit shows then I’m in favour of it.
The internet was a military project too, should be throw that out as well?
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So I guess using NASA’s Bowie cover as my campaign theme song is right out then?
It’s not working now because the video has since been made private, but when it was publicly-available it was easy to download.
For anyone that’s wondering, I have no intention of redistributing the video.
I think he was referring to “Operation Paperclip,” in which Nazis were spared war crimes trials for the opportunity to come to America and work their technical magic for the government.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/operation-paperclip-national-security-trumped-ethical-concern/
Didn’t Bowie sell all his rights to a holding company long ago? Some kind of bond offering? Maybe I’m wrong about how that whole thing worked, but I don’t think he has direct control over his catalog anymore. So blaming the man instead of blaming the bankers seems misdirected to me.
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I love the proposal to change the copyright system to allow extensions only if the holder pays a few percent of royalties as a tax to the US government for protecting the privilege of having exclusive access to those royalties.
It cuts through the BS where holding companies trade these rights for the purpose of suing people instead of actually selling the work.
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Welcome to BoingBoing, new poster. We hope you stick around to contribute something useful to the discussion.
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PoseytheMovie, meet David_Abernathy. New players should hold hands for safety.
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Let’s hope.
If Chris hadn’t done it, then this wouldn’t have been possible:
Other copies exist:
Earthbound covers:
The Smashing Pumpkins get a pass:
I love this one:
Who’s that?
He’s an astronaut.
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Chirs Hadfield is an astronaut, not a professional musician, so stop the bullshit about quality of the cover. You’re missing the point. He’s an astronaut playing David Bowie’s Space Oddity
FROM SPACE!
Not once did Bowie do that.
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As long as the rocket goes up
They don’t care where it comes down
“That’s not our department,”
Said Werner Von Braun
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NASA didn’t rise from the aches of Hitler’s Germany in any scandalous sense. Yes, Wernher von Braun did work for the Nazis (under duress). As the greatest rocket scientist alive in the 30s his choices were to watch his family die and then suffer the same fate, or work for the government. Once the war was over he came to the US and at NASA he worked to develop the civilian side of the US space program via NASA (though he did work on ballistic missiles before moving to NASA as a condition of immigration).
He didn’t try to enslave Jews, empower Hitler, or engage in any Nazi-related activities. While NASA has been tied to the military-industrial complex through sharing research with the DoD’s space programs, it was started as a civilian program, and isn’t primarily tied to the DoD, only peripherally. The DoD has always had its own space programs, and didn’t need NASA.
Your claims about Nazi connections are completely misleading, and your claims about military applications are simply false.
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Wow, that was a quick jump to Nazis.
…You see, if you take the “S” in NASA and turn it backwards then it spells NAZA, which pretty much means they’re a Nazi sleeper cell developing space lasers to rule the world from above.
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I think most Brits would consider the development and deployment of the V2 a ‘Nazi-related activity’. What’s the ‘civilian side’ of the space program anyways? What did we get out of it… TANG? Space-food sticks… what? In short, there is none. “Control of space means control of the world,” Lyndon Johnson.
American Imperialism must be recognised before it can be stopped.
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This information page might help educate you a bit on what the space program has done for us: http://www.problem-solving-techniques.com/US-Space-Program.html
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Some terrific references there to the great work done by Honeywell, one of the stalwarts of the Military Industrial Complex and proud profiteers from anti-personnel mines and cluster-bombs during Vietnam - but hey, they helped design a smoke detector.
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[quote=“bwv812, post:16, topic:31696”]
WTF does “popularizing” a well-known song have to do with copyright and its function? Do you want to also argue that Bowie should pay Hadfield for his (unsolicited) advertising? Does popularizing a creative work have anything to do with copyright’s stated purpose of encouraging creativity? Are creative artists only allowed to be concerned with how popular their work becomes?[/quote]
How in the does preventing a guy on the ISS from having a Bowie cover floating around the internet “encourage creativity”? I’m not against copyright. I am against the utterly insane set of laws we have now that do their damndest to take creativities throat and wring its neck. If you want to do something creative in this day and age, and your creative endeavor so much as touches anyone else’s copyrighted or potentially copyrighted work, you are utterly and completely fucked. Fair use is so weak, and a dude covering a song and taking no credit for it should be fair use, that even if you think you have the right, your chances of being sued into oblivion anyways are so high it isn’t worth the fight. Add on top of this that all works are essentially copyrighted for forever, meaning that countless works have been forgotten and forever destroyed due to the insanity. Why? Because even if you manage to get ahold of the media, there is no way to track down who owns the rights to it and you can be sued out of nowhere.
Copyright should actually be for a limited time, and fair use should let people remix and cover it in an ironclade way where the threat of lawsuit is low.
Thank you insane copyright laws. The video has been taken. Creativity is saved!
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Hey so the complainers feel that by performing or broadcasting from a certain distance from earth IP laws should not apply? Heh don’t we already use satellites broadcasting from similar heights so what about that?
I’m on Bowie’s side but he could have made it “Five Years” 
cause my brain hurts a lot…
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So if NASA can get free ‘feelgood’ publicity forever from Bowie’s creativity, then it’s game-on I suppose… Nascar can use AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’ for as long as they like, as long as it’s just the drivers singing a cr@ppy version. The NBA can nab Van Halen’s ‘Jump’, the NHL ‘Ice Ice baby’ etc. I reckon it’s ok for an individual to do a cover-version, but this guy is pretty far from that.
