Court: Sampling May Violate Copyright Law (Ap)

Also, NWA? What year is this?

why are we blaming nashville? according to the story, the decision was made by a cincinnati-based appeals court in a case brought by funkadelic's original label and publisher, which i believe are/were in detroit.

I'm not positive, but I always assumed that licenses to use popular songs or the work of well-known artists are expensive. Is this the case? Who decides how much to charge?

whoever owns the copyright in the performance, which is usually the record company. they own it, they can charge whatever the hell they want.

what i meant to say was...whoever owns the copyright in the performance, which is usually the record company. they own it, they can charge whatever the hell they want. plus you've got to pay whoever owns the copyright in the song itself, which is sometimes the artist and sometimes a publishing company. (this is altogether different than simply doing a cover version of someone else's song, which you don't need permission to do; for that, you just pay an automatic, government-stipulated royalty based on your sales.)

wow, that's a good one. no mention of the fact that if they don't want to give you a license, they don't have to; or that the price they name for a 'valuable' pop tune commodity might be out of reach of an independent act who are trying to do something non-mainstream with the sample.

until there is compulsory sample licensing that allows anyone to pay for a sample in the exact way they pay publishing to perform a cover, this is going to have a damaging impact on music.

I'm ambivalent about this. I think maybe there ought to be an arbitrary length or something and anything over that would need to be licensed. But to have to license ever possible tiny bit of sample seems excessive to me.

"Aren't visual artists allowed to get away with a great deal of appropriation of pre-existing visual material"
Not like they used to...see Lawrence Lessig's writing on the over-enforcement of copyright laws in recent years.

It's the ownership society!

comedy is like that sometimes.

Just recently there was that Wilco vs Iridial - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sampling issue (althogh that was taken to court in the UK i believe). There have been countless cases some goign one way others goign the other way. It just comes down to how much dough the owner of the Publishing rights has.

How about bands like ESG or Liquid Liquid. who have been sampled to fuck by countless hip hop djs. but because they aren't on some huge label they dont' get squat.

does DJ Shadow clear a sample? should he? Supposing that the original artist owns thier song and all its rights should some will smith be able to come along steal a loop (ala rock the casbah, or that Le Chic track - He's the greatest Dancer) and sell millions and make shitloads without showing some respect to the orignal artist?

What about Daft Punk? anyone heard that song by Edwin Birdsong - Cola Bottle Baby. - if you've got a copy of Discovery laying around can you check and see if Harder Better Stronger acknowledges Edwin Birdsong?

Yeah, this ruling really means nothing since it's only something new for non-identifiable samples. If someone catches you on it, then obviously they identified the sample, so it wasn't non-identifiable anyway!

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002153.shtml