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?"
Right back at ya (Score:5, Funny)
Illegal Samples (Score:3, Funny)
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 som
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
However, given that, the Stones, whose song was sampled in this suit...were some of the biggest thieves in their day...by their own admission. Keith admits to 'lifting' riffs here and there a
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you haven't listened. Hip-hop was the successor to jazz and rock as a new, vital, interesting music form. Once. Listen to the first Tribe Called Quest album (for one). Just because people make sounds from a clarinet or guitar instead of from a tape doesn't matter, what matters is the end product is different from the original in a significant way. You are making arbitrary judgements - why is replaying a lick you heard someone else play on a guitar different from reprocessing sounds recorded elsewhere into new sounds? They're not stealing, they're building, and that's the heart of creativity, building on the works of others.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
Past tense; so what is Hip-Hop now?
And on topic, we will never again see a legal release like "Paul's Boutique" because it costs too much to clear the samples. But there only needs to be one.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just "Paul's Boutique." It's the entire Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly catalogues. It's Plunderphonics, Negativland, Mentallo and the Fixer, and
Half of the albums I love would never have been released in the current climate regarding samples. Ironically, their use in that music is what prompted me to find and buy a bunch of the sources -
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
Daniel
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
But is Rap Music: Yes
Is it Art: Yes
Is it Good: No
The reason why I dont think Rap is good is not because of it a mixture of old m
Re:Right back at ya (Score:4, Insightful)
playing 3 chords, a simple drum beat and singing about love is hardly music also?
Re:Right back at ya (Score:4, Insightful)
And they wonder why record sales are down....
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
can you think of any artform where that statement is not true?
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the whole idea should be to EMPOWER precisely this sort of use for older art. Based on that, this lawsuit is an obscenity that demonstrates the problem with the current copyright scheme.
Code is meant to event
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
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to get into a long discussion over this, but this is a little shortsighted. These are tiny samples -- nobody it ripping off an entire sone here. Sure there's mixing involved -- but
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 Consortium
Rae and Christian
Prefuse 73
Aim
El-P
Boards Of Canada
Rjd2
The Majesticons
Massive Attack
Bo
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
to the average person, thats lik saying:
"Hacking is not equal to cracking..."
there both the same to anyone outside the 'scene'.
BTW nice list, theres a couple I haven't heard, I think i'll try to find a copy to borrow and see if its worth having my own copy.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Informative)
That's just ridiculous. Now I mean no disrespect to the genre, but not everything is Hip Hop. I hear that a whole lot by people who are trying a little too hard to prove the cultural relevancy, and its almost always based on the rather tenuous claim that they are all using Hip Hop beats. Its a narrow-minded, hiphop-centric view, IMO. You've got it backwards. In terms o
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
The first is, for example, the rampant sampling of Parliment by Dr. Dre. He's taking it because it's a funky beat and he wants to use it.
But then there's the way "found sound" artists like Negativland do it. They're stealing samples because of their CULTURAL significance and not just because it's some funky beat. For example, their recent album Dispepsi used samples from Pepsi ads (among other places) to make points about corporate greed, etc.
In these cases, the fact that it is a sample is the WHOLE POINT. Even if you could recreate the sample, it wouldn't be useful anymore at that point.
Should Dr. Dre have to pay for his samples? It's up to debate, obviously. Should Negativland? I'd argue that what Negativland does is the very thing that Fair Use was set up for. I'd say no way.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line: learn to play your own damn instruments!
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm being slow, but it seems like getting a song I would normally have to pay for for free is is a financial gain. I have the song to listen to, plus I still have the cash. This strikes me more as the difference between someone who steals a trade secret to produce a new product and a common shoplifter.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you are slow, because while getting music for free instead of paying for it would obviously leave you with more cash, financial gain in this case is not your primary purpose. The primary purpos
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
To be more clear: you area not involved in legal competition, you're are illegally stealing value from their product. On the other hand, if you merely looked at available products, and made knock-offs that didn't pretend to be the same as the original, you would be involved in normal market competition and thus be in the right.
This, of course, is discussed in detail in many nano-tech articles/books, in particular Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age", which makes it clear that eventually it will not be the product which is sold generally, but instead the plans (i.e. pure intellectual property) which are sold.
Alternately, certain products may be more efficient to produce en mass, as opposed to some nano-synthesizer, and those will still be sold as completed products.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think sampling is used in place of playing instruments more than 10% of the time, you're not paying any attention. There are SO many things that can be done with sampling and scratching that can't be done with "instruments" under any circumstances. To simply say "don't do those things" is about as short sighted as saying that the RIAA's distribution model is the only one that ought to ever be.
Re:Right back at ya (Score:5, Insightful)
He did "play his own instrument" (Score:5, Informative)
Dre testified that before hiring a musician to play a bassline from the Fatback Band's 1980 song "Backstrokin'" for his 2001 track "Let's Get High," he consulted a musicologist who said the riff was commonplace.
so this isn't an issue with a sample, but rather with a riff. and this is murkier ground. Note that Dre even hired a musicologist before he used the bassline. In my mind, he did the right thing, but got screwed anyway.
-BlueLines
Change your bottom line (Score:4, Insightful)
Bottom line: learn to play your own damn instruments!
You are right up to your bottom line. It has nothing to do with playing your own instruments, it has to do with giving credit. You sample someone else's work, give them credit.
And for the record, Dre hired someone to play the riff, he didn't just lift the sample. RTFA, it is right there. Besides, sampling can be simply done, or in very creative ways. In ways, it may take more skill to resample something creatively than just replay someone else's riff. Musicians are always influenced by other musicians, and therefore may pick up riffs and techniques. Sampling is just another way of doing it. Sure, it can be blatant and a simple ripoff (Puff Daddy) or it can be inventive (Beastie Boys).
The real bottom line: give credit where credit is due.
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
Samples (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Samples (Score:5, Informative)
Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 [cornell.edu]
Not 'sampled', 'replayed' (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW do you mean a major part of the sampling song or of the sampled song? Eg, if you sample some half-second odd noise which has no place in the original recording, and build a song around it, should you have to pay?
Re:Not 'sampled', 'replayed' (Score:3, Informative)
There are 2 types of copyright here : One, the copyright of the song itself (picture sheet music, lyrics), and the copyright of the recording.
If you have a CD of Mozart's 'Jupiter' Symphony, the copyright of the music has long-since expired (They didn't have Disney back then), but the particular recording you're listening to is copyrighted. In such a case, you couldn't sample the recording without permission, but you could certainly play it yours
Re:Not 'sampled', 'replayed' (Score:5, Funny)
Now, if they had made up a bassline of their own, and someone found a song which played the same six notes, could they sue as well?
Ask Vanilla Ice and he will tell you that the answer is "Yes".
Re:Not 'sampled', 'replayed' (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not 'sampled', 'replayed' (Score:3)
There are only a limited number of note combinations possible, and of those a smaller set are msuically harmonic ("pleasant to the ear"). *ANY* selection of notes smaller than an entire work will, eventually, be repeated elsewhere and thus defining what constitutes the integral piece of "creativity" naturally limits creativity. Ignoring music theory constraints (eg. change in key, note length, scale harmonics) there are just under 60 million 4-note combinations pl
Re:Samples (Score:5, Insightful)
In written word, it's considered a serious offense if, say a poem, or even a snippet of a poem, is republished as part of a larger work without credit given to the original author. Why should a (recorded) bassline be different than a poem in regards to copyright?
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:Samples (Score:3, Informative)
And that "something" has a name, and its name is "a derivative work".
Puffy essentially
Karma (Score:5, Funny)
Karma, yes indeed.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Photo here [x-entertainment.com]
Re:Karma (Score:3, Funny)
It's worse than that, he isn't even a real doctor!
Copyright (Score:3, Insightful)
Samples ARE protected by copyright. In this case it doesn't fall into parody or critique, so why are you asking one of the silliest questions I've ever read in my life?
Google yields answers in abundance, you don't need to ask slashdot readers for every silly little thing.
OK I'm better now.
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.
Re:Copyright (Score:2)
you're right, we'll never see any thing from this or last century enter into the public domain during our lifetime.
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.
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:Copyright (Score:2, Funny)
Like, how retarded ARE you to not figure that out?
It's not YOUR audio, it's someone else's.
DUH.
Re:Copyright (Score:2)
And ya know, sometimes it's more fun to have an actual discussion about stuff than to just surf websites about a topic.
The same laws should apply (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer to the delimma (Score:5, Insightful)
I say let their own crap bite them in the ass like this.
It's only proof that the copyright laws have been perverted to the point that they cause more problems than the apparent protection they give.
too bad, Dr. dre.... being bit by your own is the only way to get you to wake up.
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.
Samples and Ring Tones (Score:4, Insightful)
actually (Score:2)
"Damn, thats almost The Verve"
It was kinda obvious. btw Metallica should be sued for copying David Bowie's "Andy Warhol" on "Master of Puppets"(the song)
What's it say... (Score:3, Insightful)
Allow me to be a bit cynical here... (Score:3, Insightful)
Lobbying? (Score:2)
Sign me up for this double standard!
The Human Factor (Score:5, Interesting)
Not all bad (Score:2, Funny)
What's the Licence (Score:2, Funny)
If its GPL, then Dre has just incurred the wrath of RMS...
"Dr Dre vs RMS"
is that the name of the lawsuit or the title of the track?
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.
Shouldn't this be covered by fair use? (Score:2)
it seems like more than that though (Score:2)
Rapper scratch ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, this music copyright business is seriously messed up. I wonder if African tribes and australian Aboriginas realize they're sitting on a gold mine, that they should start collecting on their millenia-old drum "samples" copyrights.
Re:Rapper scratch ? (Score:3, Funny)
if = 30 second clips avoid royalties (Score:2)
(ever notice how the cheap movies never play more than 30 seconds of a song
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.
Re:Sampling has been dead for 10 years (Score:5, Interesting)
His first album: Entroducing, if i recall correctly was entirely made from samples.
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
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
IMHO copyright applies if it's recognizable ... (Score:2)
- If you use a verse, or even a couple bars, from "Sergant Pepper", pay up - to Michael Jackson. B-) If you use half a track to go "veep-a-veep-a-veep" for your percussion, who cares if it's from Sergant Pepper, A Night at the Opera, or Behtoven's fifth? (But why didn't you just use one that's in the public domain by now anyhow.)
- If you play a couple bars backward, fair use. If you play a track backward, pay up.
- If you
No Easy Answer (Score:2)
I think it requires... wait for it... judgement. That's right. Judges will actually have to judge.
What's are the general guidelines for judgement? I think there should be 3 classes of works as far as sampling is concerned. Class 1: The samples are more like notes, it's difficult to tell where they came from, or even if you can tell where they came from the resulting composition is a totally new work. Sampling artist keeps all royalties. Class 2: extensive use of sampling to the point where you hav
"Shut the fuck up and get what's comming to you" (Score:5, Funny)
I DO hope the Doctor is enjoying his own medicine.
TWW
Make royalties mandatory... (Score:2)
Royalty amount: Song is 5 minutes, sample is one minute long, 1/5 of profit is royalty payment.
You can always sign a contract to sell it for less, but this means that anyone can sample anything but they have to pay. Also any length sample should be credited if desired by the owner.
It was not a sample. (Score:5, Informative)
"Dre testified that before hiring a musician to play a bassline from the Fatback Band's 1980 song "Backstrokin'" for his 2001 track "Let's Get High," he consulted a musicologist who said the riff was commonplace.
He had another musician play some notes - it wasn't a sample from a copyrighted work. Surely there is a difference.
Shouldn't the suit be for $900,000,000,000 (Score:3, Funny)
That's $150,000 per song [slashdot.org] times 6 million [rollingstone.com] copies for a total of $900,000,000,000 ?
All the way (Score:2)
The ironic thing about this is that when sampling started becoming popular and people did it very heavily, the result was much more creative and interesting than it is now.
Then you would take sounds from loads of sources and slap them all together. Now you just find a catchy riff, go talk to their lawyers, an let some talentless hack mutter something over it.
I'm afraid though, that the music industry has foisted such a restricted idea of fair
Bring It On (Score:2)
Should samples be protected by copyright? As long as copyright law and the DMCA exist in their current form, Hell yes! Many uses of copyrighted material appear "fair" but are prohibited by current US and international law. Just because one of those uses is especially lucrative (read: desired by the masses enough to pay for it) doesn't mean we should ask that enforcement be relaxed for that use. In fact, quite the opposite.
If you believe fair use should be broader than it currently is, then this is your
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'
This is a rare case. (Score:5, Informative)
Live By The Sword (Score:3, Insightful)
You're goddamm skippy they should be. If they want music to enter the public domain, let them fight the psychotic duration of copyright.
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.
Samples = More Record Sales (Score:3, Insightful)
'Tell the truth, James Brown was old / Until Eric B. and Rakim Made 'I Know You Got Soul."
And sure enough, I bought the James Brown box set a couple years later. Any interest I had in Jazz music started from hearing different producers sample the Blue Note library, and from then on I just started buying records by artists that had been sampled, hoping to find something interesting.
The point is, a lot of these musicians who are being sampled have been washed up for years (case in point, Gilbert O'Sullivan who sued Biz Markie for sampling "Alone Again (Naturally)".) Yet, after Biz sampled that record I went and found the 45 to hear it. If it weren't for Dre sampling that record nobody in the US would've heard it to begin with. Do you think the whole resurgence of P-Funk amongst white teenagers/college students would've happened if it weren't for Dre sampling so many Funkedelic and Parliament tracks?
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.
"Every musician is a magpie and a thief. " (Score:5, Insightful)
MTV did a "Rockumentary" years ago about The Who [amazon.com], wherein Pete Townshend, the guitar legend did utter "Every musician is a magpie and a thief." and then explained that music and "hooks" or riffs are like expressions in a language. You can come up with something completely original, only to hear a song on the radio later and think "Oh, that's where that came from!" It's impossible NOT to use "samples" of other people's creativity. There's a finite number of chord changes on a guitar, for example. Most of them sound bad. There are few sweet ones left. Rythm is the only degree of freedom left, and it still leaves a finite set.
They should give credit, not money (Score:3, Insightful)
This suit in particular should have been laughed out of court. It was just 6 bass notes. The artist just blended these note to create something new.
Copyright is supposed to be a balance, a lmied time balance at that. For any community to grow, it is imperitve that there is no strangle hold on who controls art.
Sure, if I try to release someelse complete work as my own, thats wrong, or if I change a song and say it was an originall thats wrong. but taking a sample it not wrong, its neccessary for the growth of a community.
try to remeber, this case involves a repper, but it is bigger then rap music, so try not to let your personal taste for the particular genre taint how you react.
Personally, I don't judge music by genre, I only judge whether or not I like a piece of music on the singkle piece of music.
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.
____________________
Plagiarizing Music...I'm divided (Score:4, Insightful)
Some bands, like "The Avalanches" have done same really skillful, clever, and artistic sampling to make some great, thoughtful songs.
Other bands have simply taken some riff from another popular song, and used that riff's catchyness to make their own crappy song sound catchy.
Now, I'd be pretty pissed off if I spent 25 years mastering the guitar in order to write and perform some amazing riff and used it to make a really popular song, only to have some other musician at his computer take a "sample" of the best part of the riff and use it in his own song. That riff, whenever you hear it, will remind you of my hit song; and I may not want to be associated with the crappy song that the other musician wrote. Essentially, one artist tries to steal another artist's glory.
For example, one thing that made U2 so popular is Bono's distinctive voice. He worked long and hard to be able to find a sound that people would want to listen to. So why should another artist be able to take a "sample" of him singing a famous line, paste it into his own song, and then sell it ???
Especially when an artist samples a riff from another genre, then uses it in a song which appeals to a market that wouldn't know it was a sample. You know Will Smith's song, "Men in Black"? The whole thing is a remake and rewording of an older song (someone pleeeease help me identify it). All he did was put on a drumbeat and put in some new words. So why does he earn millions for it?
There's nothing so amazing about taking a drum track and using Windows Sound Recorder to mix in the best parts of someone else's song. But, as long as you have the other artist's approval, there's no problem with it.
Personally I'm not a fan of "Come with me", Puff Daddy+Jimmy Page's remake of Led Zepplin's song "Cashmere", but at least it had the original Artist's approval.
Take a look at this hypothesis... (Score:3, Insightful)
But I also thought that since it would be GPL, any person sampling my music would have to make it GPL, right? So if an artist who samples one of my songs just uses normal copyright, I should sue him till he makes it GPL? The idea being that people wil want to sample *his* song and make it GPL, and so forth.
Of course, the implications of this are immense (how could GPL apply to music, etc. etc.), but it's just something I thought of and I feel it should be brought here. Hell, maybe an Ask
Re:One thing I have never understood (Score:2, Informative)
Sure it doesn't say a lot about his... talent (*chuckle*), but at least he did it the legal way.
Actually, no. (Score:2, Informative)
I will not deny that Vanilla Ice made an ass o
Re:Actually, no. (Score:2)
Re:Actually, no. (Score:2, Funny)
No, no no.
Vanilla's hook went "da-da-da-da-da-dada" while the original went "da-da-da-da-da-dada- uh.. da." See, it's that extra 'da' that makes the whole claim unfounded.
Re:Ice Ice Baby (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Re-recording is covering a song. (Score:2)
Under US copyright law there's a compulsory license and a statutory rate for that. The author of the song gets paid a set price and can't turn you down. The record industry (but not ASCAP) loves this.
There should be similar arrangements for sampling.
Copyrights are Supposed to Benefit Society (Score:2)
I call it art.
What happened to the idea that copyright law is in society's interest. It was supposed to provide an incentive to content creators - protecting the upside that typically motivates them to create content.
BUT is it in society's interest to restrict works which build on other work? That's progress and should be encouraged at all costs.
Re:Sampling vs. arranging (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand the sentiment, but I disagree. When you put your music or your story or your ideas out there for people to enjoy, people take them and make them a part of their lives. Your work becomes more than your work, it becomes what people take from it and what people add to it. That's our culture. To fence this culture off from everyone, to refuse to let people build on your ideas, is wrong and
Re:This will get reversed. (Score:2, Insightful)
One of them requires actual talent for one thing....