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Dr. Dre to pay $1.5 mil for "Illegal Sample"
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?"
Remember kids, musicians don't steal. They SAMPLE!
Dr. Dre boots users from Napster.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
Once the copyright expires, you can do what you want with it. Isn't that the way derivative works work?
::takes a happy pill::
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.
evil adrian
If I'm going to get in trouble because I legally encode CDs into Ogg/MP3, then why shouldn't an artist get in trouble for actually profiting off someone else's work? I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but the law should apply to everyone.
Vote for global prefs bug
Should samples be protected by copyright, or should artists/musicians have the right to manipulate the old into the new?"
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If artists get huffy and litigous when someone composes a ring-tone of a section of one of their songs then they shouldn't be suprised when they get busted for doing essentially the same thing. Samples are derivative works and are part of the copyrighted original work. Stealing isn't legal if you don't take everything.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This is irony at its finest, people. So many artists don't want you to get MP3s for free, yet they have no qualms crying out for free samples. Of course, this excludes those groups that don't much mind the MP3 "revolution". Keep on rockin' in the free world, yo. But, for the others, that takes a brass set of cojones.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
Upon reading that Dr. Dre was instructed to "pay $1.5 million for an 'illegal sample,'" I was beginning to anticipate something entirely different than a story regarding lawsuits related to intellectual property. :-)
Do you like German cars?
When rappers scratch, they move the LP back and forth. So, what happens during the backward stroke, when the record is played backward ? does Minder Music pay Dr. Dre ? if the record is scratch slowly, does Dr. Dre pays Minder Music slowly, by installments ?
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The problem with the Verve was that they copied the Stones' song completely, slowing down the tempo a bit. Dr. Dre copied a short riff from a song by the Fatback Band. Experts at the trial said that the riff in question is common in a lot of music, and not unique to the Fatback Band song.
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.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
I DO hope the Doctor is enjoying his own medicine.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
From MTV's article:
"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.
I'm a 2000 man.
It's definitely not that simple. dudev("That's just, like, your opinion, man.");
/joe
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.
"I love phat_joe."
OK. But there was no sample. It was a replayed bass line. 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?
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?
Since the late 80's most rappers and their respective producers normally go out of their way to make sure that all samples are cleared by the copyright holders. In the 80's Biz Markie used some samples and was sued, so since then rappers have been more careful. Of course there are always idiots who try to get away with it, like "Ice Ice Baby", sampling "Under Pressure" In most cases the copyright holders have no problem with rappers using their samples if the money is right. Dr. Dre has been using samples his whole career, so it's strange that he would get caught using a sample without proper permissions.
It doesn't *need* cleared, espeically in the case of parody and the such. If used seriously it pretty much still falls under copyright. Hell, at the very least the original artist should be given credit.
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?
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.
Fair Use IS law.
/joe
Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107
"I love phat_joe."
Dre's protege wears a "Fuck Napster" shirt on MTV
Photo here
If the sample is recognisable as a major part of another song, it should have to be cleared for use by the artist. Simple as that.
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.
MTV did a "Rockumentary" years ago about The Who, 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.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Jazz as an artform made itself from sampling -- only to them it is called quoting. You play a few notes from somebody else's tune, or the main melody only to mess with it -- and that's the objective! -- to take someone else's idea and create something new with it. In art and writing, this is called allusion. In science it is called citing and in code it's called open source. I put all of these items in scare quotes because when it comes down to it, they are all borrowing and none of them are piracy.
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.
____________________
Well whenever you sample something, it's polite to ask the owner of the music whether it's ok to do so. Without proper references or approval, you'd be plagiarizing their work.
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.
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