In 2003, Swedish artist Erik Bünger had an epiphany: Why say you're sorry when you could have Britney Spears (or Bono or Christina Aguilera) say it for you?

At the time, he was thinking about how pop music affected his daily life (which is something that artists who specialize in "recontextualizing and remixing media" often do). He realized that his experiences were no different than those of a kid in America — or anywhere else, for that matter. Everything he needed to know, he learned from the songs he heard on the radio.

"I more or less learned to speak English through listening to pop music, and sometimes I feel there's a pop-music phrase coming out of my mouth every time I speak English," he told MTV News. "I started thinking about how pop-music lyrics in general must influence people's lives — how they limit the way we speak and how we learn to identify our feelings of love and sadness with those of famous stars. So I wanted to create something that would sort of be revenge on the music industry. Instead of them forcing their words upon us, I wanted to make it possible for you to force your own words into their mouths."

Bünger decided to pool his resources — which included some computer code-writing classes and his job with Swedish National Radio — and launch the "Let Them Sing It for You Project," a Web-based encyclopedia filled with more than 3,000 words and phrases, each hand-picked from some of the biggest pop smashes of the past 30 years.

Visitors to the site (www.sr.se) simply input a phrase, and the Project grabs the voices of Britney, Salt-N-Pepa or Steven Tyler to "sing" what has been typed. For example, the phrase "I love you" is sung back by Chris Isaak (the "I" from his tune "Wicked Game"), Robert Plant (the "love" from Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love") and Brian Johnson (the "you" from AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long"). Phrases can be sent to friends around the world. For free.

While the whole thing seems like an awful lot of work (Bünger spent more than three months digging through the Swedish National Radio archives to find phrases), he claims that it's all worth it. After all, he's spreading his own message of empowerment around the world. And the whole "free" bit has so far managed to keep the dreaded copyright lawyers away.

"Strangely enough, no one has complained," Bünger said. "I was sort of hoping that I'd get a phone call from Prince demanding to get his 'please' back. That'd be hilarious. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, that never happened.

"[Copyright] laws are not very clear when it comes to something like this, and they tend to differ from country to country," he added. "The way to defend it is that it's a new work of art which is bigger than the single samples it's made up of. It's also a noncommercial art project, free for everybody to use without paying."

Bünger says that visitors to the site routinely offer him suggestions for new phrases, and he tries to update the Project's database as often as possible. Which, in his own words, helps the Project continue to grow and evolve as a sort of living, breathing social experiment, a way of taking the power back to the people. Now if only the people would treat it as such.

"A lot of people want me to change particular samples, so they send me e-mail after e-mail," Bünger said. "And honestly, the most popular phrases continue to be stuff you'd expect. Last time we checked, the F-word was the winner by a landslide, plus a whole bunch of other words you can't say on MTV."

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