Dr. Dre to pay $1.5 mil for "Illegal Sample" 871
jwlidtnet writes "According to MTV, Dr. Dre has lost a lawsuit filed over a presumably-uncleared sample on his last album (Dre still hopes to appeal). This is certainly not the first time that something like this has happened: in the mid-nineties, British band The Verve were forced to pay all royalties from their song Bittersweet Symphony (*and* alter song credits) after Allen Klein--who owns the rights to the 1960's Stones catalogue--discovered that the song used a sample from an orchestral recording of "The Last Time."
Thing is, though, that many groups believe that such lawsuits shouldn't occur except in the most blatant circumstances; among these groups, Musicians Against the Copyrighting of Samples and the group Negativland are perhaps the most outspoken. Should samples be protected by copyright, or should artists/musicians have the right to manipulate the old into the new?"
The Human Factor (Score:5, Interesting)
Irony, (Score:3, Interesting)
Sampling Just like microsoft "innovation." (Score:2, Interesting)
If the song is copyrighted, why should little pieces of the song not be? If you can't come up with your own ideas, get out of the music business.
Re:Copyright (Score:3, Interesting)
Copyrights originally were supposed to be 20 years. That would mean anything written in the 60's and 70's should be fair game now. But they extended everything.
Still Dre (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.bet.com/articles/0,1048,c3gb3061-372
Sampling has been dead for 10 years (Score:5, Interesting)
In neither case was the music actually sampled, that is, a bit of the original recording used in the new music. While that technique was commonplace in the 80's in rap music, it occurs a lot less frequently today. After some litigation, most notably Gilbert O'Sullivan's lawsuit against Biz Markie, ended unlicensed sampling, most artists started to re-record bits of songs to mix into their raps. The amount of music re-recorded is not enough to infringe on the copyright of the original music, and since it isn't an actual sample of the original recording, it doesen't infringe on that copyright either.
As for the issue of whether sampling should be legal, I say yes. Check out the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique to hear sampling as an art form at it's peak.
Simple answer (Score:2, Interesting)
So that people who can't play instruments can "borrow" other artists work
I don't think that is a good plan.
Here is a better plan. Fix copyright back to 70-100 years Max.
OTOH, if two artist independantly develop the same riff, then both are free to use it, However if there is a significant gap between the first and second. The second is and should be obligated to acknowledge influence, or prove that it is not a derivative work...
One example that comes to mind was the first time I heard the new Madonna song... some crap about life in America and yoga and pilates. Anyway I was immediately reminded of Falco's Rock Me Ammadeus.
Re:Copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
How short is a sample? What if I recreate the notes on my own instead of actually using a sample? Is that still covered by copyright?
In actuality there have been court rulings on all of the above - and the answer is 4 notes, doesn't matter, and yes. Which leads to something like an absurdly small number of harmonies available (~96k? I don't recall, but it's silly) before everything is copyrighted. Odds are, if you write a song now, you've violated someone else's copyright.
Perhaps the real question is whether or not the sample is a substantive portion of the song -- if so then it's probably a derivative work. Otherwise it's not. What the hell is a substantive portion? It's just like the legal definition of pornography - I'll know it when I hear it. There are shades of grey, not everything is black and white, and not everything should be, otherwise you paint yourself into silly little corners and do more harm than good.
Remember, just because the answers are out there - be it on Google, in the court system, or public opinion - doesn't mean that they're the right ones. Ask any minority group (not just blacks) in the Southeastern US prior to 1960.
Re:Samples (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the Fair Use doctrine, I can sample your music withour permission. For instance, I could make a parody or social criticism using your music.
And even if your sample is recognizable, it is still possible, artistically, to use it in a completely new way.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:2, Interesting)
Look at clothing - Gucci comes out with a new shoe and the next week a dozen factories in Brazil are cranking out similar, but not identical, shoes, perfectly legal. Why is music different?
This is just as silly as copywriting small snipits of code. This system has become so corrupt it appears there no alternatives to breaking the law. When there is no justice only the criminals are just.
Re:Copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
Filing for copyright extentions is actually a fairly reasonable thing - as long as there is an upper limit. That way if you want to preserve your copyright you have to keep paying (presumably more) to keep the work out of the public domain. In theory it would ensure that only works of substantive value to the copyright holder kept their copyright while the vast majority of works fell into the public domain.
Yeah, you can make an argument that it only really helps corporations, but if an individual author feels that the work has value either in current form or in derivative form (say, a movie or game about a book) then they could continue renewing copyright. Toss in some rules about different cost structures for individual vs corporate filings, a penalty for assignation of copyright from personal to corporate status, etc. and you might just start getting things back on the right track.
Sampling vs. Stealing. (Score:2, Interesting)
However, there are cases even withing the small genre of EBM/Industrial where the artists got a little sample happy. KMFDM had to re-release thier album NAIVE due to not clearing a huge sample from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Actually, Apotheosis got burned for the exact same sample. One case that bugged me was a Toronto band, Malhavoc, having to do the same thing with an album because they sampled Mick Jagger screeching in Sympathy for the Devil.
The question begs asking though, how is that really any different from a band like Velvet Acid Christ who have sampled pretty much every word ever uttered by Brad Pitt.
Dr. Dre, and all of the other artists who "create" based solely around someone elses music are just getting what they deserve. Even in a clear case of parody like the Simpsons, Matt Groening et al. get permission before using a product name. (At least they used to.)
Re:Copyright (Score:2, Interesting)
Samples ARE protected by copyright
By the same token, it's funny how a crappy bass line can cost $1.5mil....pay me half that, and I'll actually write a good one....
recontextualization is a form of creativity (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider this: It's been standard practice in jazz soloing for just about ever to cleverly quote melodies of other tunes.
Or how about this: Both Beethoven in the Diabelli Variations and Bach in the Goldberg Variations devote a variation to quoting a tune written by another.
But if we going to focus simply on commerce, than let's consider this case: Dido release an album. No one cares. Then Eminem uses a sample from her album in his song "Stan" which is a huge hit. Suddenly people are interested in Dido. The song the sample came from is all over MTV. Now I ask: should Eminem have paid to clear the sample, or should Dido have paid for all the free exposure?
Recontextualizing as a creative act has been around for ever. Using old ideas to make new ideas is at the very heart of creativity.
Karma, yes indeed.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Photo here [x-entertainment.com]
Re:Right back at ya (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.campchaos.com/cartoons/napsterbad/mill
http://www.campchaos.com/cartoons/napsterbad/sue_
Re:Samples (Score:5, Interesting)
Well thank God someone's solved that problem. Now why don't you take on world hunger or the environment.
Trouble with your reductionalist BS is that you can take sounds from other tracks and arrange them in a sufficently creative way to create a new original work. Take Negativland's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" : it contains a recognizable sample from U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" but is obviously an original work which is critical of the record industry establishment. While I recognize the sample, I can't find the ideas represented in the original work of U2, nor do I recognize the overall song structure. Something has obviously been created.
IMHO this is not what Puffy does for instance; Puffy essentially steals all the music from a song and sets different lyrics to it... like Wierd Al.
Copyright has been totally perverted and sampling is a casualty as much as anything else.
Re:You're being stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Um... Yes?
While I understand that they are two different things, I do not understand what would put them on different legal ground.
How Much of a Sample? (Score:3, Interesting)
A musician cannot copyright a note or a chord, for example, the chords D / A / G are used in succession in many songs. "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who, "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" by Bachman Turner Overdrive are among them. However, a musician CAN copyright the exact performance of his/her playing those chords. That' to my thinking, is a sample.
Now then, take it further. I can't copyright a word. Forget getting the rights to the word "guitar" just to name one of about 300,000 in the English language. But I can copyright a string of words -- like "MY guitar gently weeps" and then sue the pants off if you stick them in your song. Of course, "My guitar gently weeps" were George Harrison's words, ironically the same guy sued for plagiarism in his song "My Sweet Lord." Go figure.
To add to the confusion, add public domain performances, and public domain literature. Rush uses direct quotes from S.T. Coleridge in their song "Xanadu." They cannot copyright them, they are public domain. But, in the song, there is a point where the words are an original set of lyrics by Neil Peart and you can bet your bottom Canadian dollar that those are as copyrighted as it gets. Moby uses public domain performances to great effect, indeed, generating new songs from antique recordings. They're his and our to harvest.
So, at the end of the day, if Dre used someone else's work without permission and rights clearances, he's guilty and should pay up. If the law is wrong, then work to change it. But if you were the guy he sampled and din't pay, you'd be mighty p/o'd and go get a lawyer.
It's all grey.
Re:Not 'sampled', 'replayed' (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sampling has been dead for 10 years (Score:5, Interesting)
His first album: Entroducing, if i recall correctly was entirely made from samples.
It's called COLLAGE, dammit! (Score:2, Interesting)
An artist working with paper can legally take a picture out of a magazine, photocopy the Mona Lisa, whatever, and add it to their own art. No laws are broken, and the artist ends up with a new piece of art uniquely their own, but added to by the inclusion of other imagery.
For those who say anybody can do that/I could be a star by using other peoples' music/waahhh/(standard
It's the same thing!
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of things;
Rap is not equal to hip hop, which I think you're really talking about. Rap is just another way of expressing yourself vocally.
And secondly, while a lot of hip hop are pure trash, there are some very interesting things out there. They just won't be played on MTV any time soon.
If you're interested in learning something, then search for and download stuff by these fine people:
Antipop ConsortiumRae and Christian
Prefuse 73
Aim
El-P
Boards Of Canada
Rjd2
The Majesticons
Massive Attack
Boom Bip
Tricky
Autechre
Deltron 3030
DJ Shadow
Handsome Boy Modeling School
Adam F
Cannibal Ox
Fingathing
etc. etc.
A Recent Phenomena... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Copyright (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not stealing; if anything, it's copyright infringement. Stealing refers to the theft of physical property and it's downright misleading to describe infringement of copyright as theft.
I don't know to be honest, but the entire executive and legislative branch of the British and American governments are just as retarded as me it seems. I mean, why have copyright laws at all if the theft laws legislate all of this?
What is Jazz? (Score:4, Interesting)
Whoever it is that thinks ideas just spring from the firmament wholly formed and uninfluenced is in dire need of a reality check or at least a trip to Disney World to play a round of spot-the-original-idea. Art springs from human life and human life is made up of a lot of art. To continue to enforce these draconian laws in the name of money will be at the cost of art and culture.
Considering how many people watch "The Bachelor" and "Fear Factor" though, maybe my point is moot. The memepool is getting damn shallow.
____________________
Puffy vs. The Roots (Score:2, Interesting)
1) Band like the Roots and the Fugees are artists. They play their own music and when they do sample or cover they add a totally unique element to the original version, creating somethign new.
2) Since I am not a big fan of new rappers like Nelly, I will draw some old examples. When Public Enemy and NWA came out, they presented a totally new sound. They did this using samples from older artists, but the overall sound was undeniably new. Unlike puffy, when you heard Public Enemy's albums, the music that you heard did not remind you of the originally sampled song.
3) Many of the Kids who listen to rap don't know any music made before 1990. Alot of these kids regard "The Cronic" as an old album. These kids have never heard of the Rolling Stones and can't name any of the Beatles songs. Exposing them to rock music in any way that increases their interest in rock can help keep rock music alive.
Now that we are getting way off topic, I have to say that I respect Dre's musical creativity, and maybe the real problem is licensing. The Rappers would give proper credit if they didn't get sued every time that they tried. I guess as long as the music business is run by lawyers no one will be able to get proper recignition or credit.
Samples are good! (Score:2, Interesting)
how soon will software look like this (Score:2, Interesting)
What if whoever the hell created the stack or the queue or the binary search tree or even the array copyrighted those data structures. We'd be screwed, having to pay licenses and get permission before we did anything.
Seems to me at some point your bass riff is common knowledge and public domain. This is a perfect example of why copyrights are too long. I just hope we can keep copyrights and patents out of software design until they either get reduced to a reasonable time limit.
What a great way to stifle creativity and future development: Patent and Copyright everything for ever so that nothing can ever be improved, tweaked, modified, extended, adapted or used in a manner other than originally intended by the original owner. Dark Ages, here we come!
If they had IP back when they invented addition, we never would have been allowed to do muliplication. Hell, I bet the patent holder for counting would have sued the inventors of both mulitplication and adding.
blah blah, this is a boring ass post isnt' it. hmm, delete or submit????
Re:Sampling has been dead for 10 years (Score:2, Interesting)
Not. Re:Sampling has been dead for 10 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Um. No. The Verve recording took only 4 notes from the stones song, and none of the lyrics!
If you listen to it, there's 4 notes that start at the beginning and they continue to loop underneath for the entire song. That's the 4 notes that they stole. Actually they didn't steal, they told the Stones that they wanted to use those notes they said ok, and the Stones more or less reneged on the deal when they found out that they'd looped it right down the whole track; and more importantly because they could, demanded full rights (legally it's a derived work as soon as you copy a single note, more or less).
The Verve probably could have held out for atleast partial credit, but the Stones played hardball and apparently knew that the Verve couldn't release their album without the Stones permission for the track, so the Stones had them by the balls.
Re:Plagiarizing Music...I'm divided (Score:2, Interesting)
Same reason any song makes millions: because a lot of people liked it enough to shell out their hard-earned cash for it. Financial success has nothing whatever to do with artistic merit or hard work (I'm not saying they're directly opposed to each either - they just have nothing to do with one another). Will Smith took a great piece and said "this is interesting, but what if I tried this" and lots of people dug it.
Composers have been borrowing liberally from one another for a very, very long time (check out all those cantus firmus masses from the Renaissance). And as much as we may not like it, sometimes the "general public" (for lack of a better term) gets more excited about the derivative piece than the original.
Ever heard of Anton Diabelli? Probably not, but he once wrote a little waltz theme that no one today would probably care much about except that Beethoven wrote a set of variations on the tune that is now widely considered to be one of the greatest examples of the theme and variations genre. From a purely artistic point of view, I think borrowing is a good thing - it lets idea small ideas grow into big ones. In the modern age of copyrighting, there are legal issues to be worked out, but the creative impulse goes back a long way and, I think, should be allowed to continue.
Its not the only case against Dre (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is Dre a bad-ass (Score:3, Interesting)
My post was totally honest though (the first part anyways.) I guess we are going to find out of Dre is still 'Death Row Records' material or if he is going to play by the rules. Those hard core Compton gangster rappers are some bad mofo's, Tupak and Biggie didn't cost anybody $1.5M and both saw their last breath when someone pulled up next to their car at a stoplight and proceeded to ventilate it with a machine gun. Because of some 'perceived disrespect.' $1.5M will buy a LOT of 'perceived disrespect.'
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Interesting)
The Great Composers learned their craft largely by performing and copying each others' work. The entire history of Western music hinges on the theft of prior ideas. Even the scales (as we know them) were initially formed by trying to make sense of what was written about ancient greek intonations.
Mozart and Beethoven "stole" from Haydn all the time, and Haydn began by stealing ideas from Baroque-era composers. Bach stole many of his church melodies from popular tavern songs. Louis Armstrong "stole" just about every riff and motif King Oliver ever came up with.
Nobody has any fucking clue where that "Nuh-NAH-nuh-na-NUH" stop-time riff in Muddy Waters' "Manish Boy" (and George Thouroghgood's "Bad to the Bone", among dozens of others) originally came from, because it, like most of the best riffs of traditional blues, had been stolen by one artist after another since before audio recording even existed. For that matter, listen to Buddy Guy and Junior Wells sing "Man of Many Words", and then listen to Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle"... It's the same damn song, except Otis used horn kicks and Buddy played a guitar solo for the bridge.
"Stealing" a sound, whether by sampling or reading sheet music or replaying it by ear, for your own composition is really no more unethical than an architect putting a feature in his building inspired by something that he liked from a Frank Lloyd Wright structure.
Actually, a better analogy is this: suing somebody for sampling or quoting a previous composition in a new one makes about as much sense as suing Peter Max for painting pictures of the Statue of Liberty.
IMHO, copyright is not a concept that should ever have been applied to music, except perhaps to entire works, with much broader terms of Fair Use to allow other artists to extrapolate.
As for the argument about whether rap is really music... Of course it is, don't be stupid. Almost all of it is really shitty music, but then so is pretty much everything Kenny G plays. Forget about "broad" definitions of music; the most precise definition of music I can give as of 2003 is "the performance art of emotive expression through sound." Does rap fit that criteria? Yes. The fact that some of you don't connect with the expression doesn't invalidate what they are doing. I doubt that most rap fans get much out of listening to Hindemeth or even Stravinsky, and now that they are "last century's music", we are all supposed to finally appreciate it after its time (or so predicted all my pretentious music profs anyway.)
I don't know why I went on such a long tirade on a /. thread that's already 600 comments deep or so. I doubt many people will read it. Something about all this talk about music and copyright kind of triggered a knee-jerk rant, I guess.