Following in the footsteps of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, two University students have chosen to use music to protest power of the music industry.
About two weeks ago, after the news of the crackdown on the Wake file-sharing website within the University network, seniors Matt Gale and Sanjay Varma wrote a little ditty they call "Ode to Fire Safety."
"We wrote it so that people would have something to listen to now that copyrighted music is not the thing to do," Gale said.
Gale and Varma did not write the song specifically to challenge the Recording Industry Association of America — which brought a suit against Wake owner Dan Peng '05 and students at other universities for facilitating copyright infringement.
Gale and Varma were interviewed in a three-way telephone conversation. Their responses came so quickly on the heels of each other, it sounded like a modern day Abbott and Costello. Both students felt that the cases against individual students are somewhat unfair.
"I feel bad for Dan Peng who's getting charged," Gale said.
"Everybody's kind of guilty of it," Varma added.
"It was probably bound to happen eventually," Gale agreed.
In an email to their friends, they contested that "copyrighted music just isn't all it's cracked up to be."
"Check it out," they wrote, "and enjoy the guilt-free pleasure of legal music recorded on shareware."
Gale and Varma, both RCAs in Wilson College, have written and recorded several other songs, such as "The RCA Song," which they have put up on the University network.
Gale plays the trumpet, Varma the guitar, and both lend their voices to the cause.
Because they are RCAs, Gale and Varma did not send a link to their song to their advisees.
Neither said he believes they would have been disciplined for doing so, but they wanted to avoid directly contesting University policy.
News of the song "Ode to Fire Safety" spread quickly, however, even reaching the ears of fire inspectors.
"It's unique, and it's comical," said University Inspections Manager Ken Paulaski. "It's like any other item that students write about fire safety, it's always taken with a grain of salt."
But like any good comedy duo, Gale and Varma both perked up quickly.
"[The shutdown of Gank, Sleep and Wake] was good because more people listened to our song than would have otherwise," Varma said.
"MP3s take up a lot of students' time, so there's probably a lot of people with nothing to do now," he continued.
"Yeah, now that we made the only legally downloadable song," Gale added.
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