Vancouver's Radiohead vs. the Matrix had the band's blessing

The Vancouver filmmaker Nicholas Podbrey screened The Matrix while switching by hand between the film's soundtrack and five Radiohead albums. Radiohead vs. the Matrix was one of the best-attended shows at the Blinding Light Cinema, which has since closed.

Podbrey changed neither work. He was playing a film and some records at the same time, in a members-only cinema, and he still asked Radiohead and Warner Bros. for permission, which both gave.

The Vancouver Sun opens a review of two books on copyright law with the case, and thought the unsettling music and the action worked better together than either does alone. Podbrey sees the piece mainly as a live performance, but he has thought about a DVD that fixes the pictures and the music together. That, the paper points out, would be a different matter, and could take him out of fair use and into breaking the law.