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Court Rules Against Unlicensed Sampling
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like there is no room at all for *any* sampling of "commercially protected" music. According to the open and future-looking judges, 'Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.'" As the article puts it, this includes "minor, unrecognisable snippets of music." The decision was in the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Maybe I've missed something obvious here. If its minor and unrecognisable, how will the copyright owner know its happened?
Personally, I'm entirely behind the idea that if your sample is recognisable as someone else's song, then you've got to license it. If you can't tell, then you've obviously done something new with the sound and its fair game.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
The article mentions the sampling of a 3-note riff. While "Name that Tune" does indicate such things are recognizable in the right context, I fear this means any musician who happens to use a short riff that happened to be in some obscure song will suffer too.
I mean, if I do a guitar solo and it happens that 3 notes used several times sound like, oh, 'cat scratch fever' or 'smoke on the water' (same riff, by the way), am I violating ownership?
And this will kill jazz... no more nods to other works in solos?
Next up: any writer who uses 3 words in sequence that appeared in a previous writer's book is now violating that original author's intellectual property and will be sued.
Worse, the article's 'stolen' 3-note riff is only 6 pieces of information-- 3 pitches plus 3 rhythms. They'd downsampled and changed the rhythm, so we're saying anything that is _similar_ to a known bit is at risk.
While the article mentions they'd sampled, I worry that original recreation will be hit with the same law, i.e. getting a session guitarist to redo a riff in a different octave with different phrasing will be seen the same as 'sampling'.
A.