Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court Asked To Reverse Music Sampling Case
CaptainEbo writes "In Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the Sixth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals eliminated the 'de minimis' exception for copyright in sound recordings, which allows artists to sample small amounts from earlier work to produce new creations. The defendants in this case have now asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Also involved in this suit are civil rights vetrans from the Brennan Center for Justice and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Both have filed an amicus brief urging that the Sixth Circuit decision be reversed. 'The Court of Appeals decision to target trivial borrowing from sound recordings isn't supported by copyright law or sound policy,' says Marjorie Heins, coordinator of the Free Expression Policy Project at the Brennan Center. 'It ignores the history and purpose of the Copyright Act and stifles creativity.'"
Now we can't mix in someone elses music into our own?
Or has anyone noticed the result of an appeal tends to corrolate more strongly with the role of a 1d2 die than any semblance of facts?
If "trivial borrowing from sound recordings isn't supported by copyright law" then we can start copying pop music like there was no tommorow. Gentlemen, start your Pirate2Pirate applications! But seriously, wouldn't it render the new Creative Commons Sampling Plus License irrelevant? Any lawyers here?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
While I understand that an artist doesnt want his music used without their permission, sampling has provided such a wealth of music that it would be a great loss. Both are important issues.
I guess theres also a copyright extension issue, as music has too long of a copyright to enter the public domain, where you can sample the entire song legally.
I guess I'd allow sampling without copying the entire song, how you gauge that would be hard.
Interesting indeed.
The judge is going to look at that amicus brief, see the name "Aziz Huq" right at the top there, and go homeland security all over this bitch.
We're fucked.
When someone produces a speech, or writes a paper, few would argue that that someone shouldn't have some kind right of ownership on the work.
When someone coins a phrase, do they gain ownership of the phrase? of course not.
Noone is allowed to reproduce the text of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech and claim it as their own.
EVERYONE has the right to include the phrase "I have a dream" in direct reference to MLKjr, in indirect reference to anything relating to him, and in contexts completely irrelevant to him. Frankly, I'd say it is property of the culture, in the most basic sense: more than the author's original words & intentions are invested into the meaning of the phrase: also invested are the hearts and minds of the people who were however subtly changed by it, and the culture they built upon it. I won't claim to know how to legislate that last part...
Anyway, the current music copyright as property over every infintessimally small component of music can NEVER work. Music is made of notes, Books and speeches of words. Somewhere between the componant and the comprised is where the MEANING of the work is reached, and that is the scale at which to begin protecting.
open source music NOW!
(I can go on for hours about how culture is only getting MORE self-referential and just meta in general, so this is really restraining myself..)
And here I thought that the courts were only supposed to interprete the law while congress made it - isn't throwing out a section of copy right law completly out of bounds for the courts, or am I completely missing something?
Good point.
It would be nice if there was music search engine you could put a riff into and see if, say, the base line for Under Pressure actually appears in, say, a Mozart Fugue.
my google-foo is not strong enough to get past the MP3 download sites...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
In Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the Sixth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals eliminated the 'de minimis' exception for copyright in sound recordings, which allows artists to sample small amounts from earlier work to produce new creations.
Now I'm not from the USA, but I was under the impression that any court other than the Supreme Court only decided whether the law applied to particular cases or not, and didn't make changes to the law itself.
What is an appeals court doing changing law?
I was thinking about borrowing small fractions of copyrighted works without permission for the last few days, and I suspect that it is legal, given that fractions are small and therefore meaningless.
Could it be the pirate's last and true hope? (I came to be fond of the pirate label, as it invokes images of booty and governors' daughters.) Seriously, stay with me for a moment. Take music. Suppose, we take samples so miniscule that it would be insane to claim ownership over them, and imbed them into public domain works in a specific way (important!), thus creating new public domain works which can be distributed legally. For example, a 3 minute Metallica song is split into 300 parts, and each part is infused into a public domain work -- a receptor. I am sure that there are ways to split a track in such a way that individual parts will become essentially meaningless. Then the receptors are labeled accordingly and distributed by fans legally. P2P may play a vital role in distribution, but it gets better: fans can actually put them on their websites and get them indexed by Google and everything else. With internet services getting cheaper by the minute, the supply will beat the demand on the most popular items. Now it may be left up to a client software to find, download receptors, and reassemble the original song by Metallica. This is what I meant by splitting in a specific way -- being able to reverse the process once all the parts are available.
If 300 fragments are not enough to loose the meaning, let it be 3000 fragments. The beauty of this scheme is in that it does not matter how many pieces there are. Once the meaning is lost, the work escapes the copyright. Once it escapes the copyright, it can be published in the open. Once it gets published in the open, it can get indexed efficiently. The end.
This seems too simple to be real. I welcome your criticism -- specifically, why it cannot work. Also, let me know of any similar existing projects, please. In fact, I feel so pumped up right now, let me know if you are willing to contribute to such a project. >:-)
"sampling has provided such a wealth of music"
"sampling has provided such a wealth of music"
"sampling has provided", "sampling has provided"
"sampling has provided such a wealth of music"
"sampling has provided" "Interesting indeed."
"sampling" "Interesing" "used without their permission"
"sampling has provided" "Interesting indeed."
"Interesing" "sampling" "the public domain"
"I'd allow sampling" "it would be a great loss"
"such a wealth of music" "it would be a great loss"
"too long of a copyright" "without their permission"
"an artist doesnt want his music" "it would be a great loss"
"enter...the...public...domain"
Has anyone ever remixed ASCII before?
If "de minimus" means some [subjective and arbitrary] threshold of borrowing of the wave form [as opposed to just the melody or perhaps the MIDI] then sound fonts are also off limits. Would that mean that companies like Roland and Alesis will join RIAA [or at least be in a legal position to join] in a crusade to eradicate forms of "piracy" that amount to less than a few hundred miliseconds of a .WAV file? You'd have to place a realtime correlation filter athwart all media streams and use it to trigger DRM hardware [software couldn't keep up] to ever catch such "piracy".
What a slippery slope this stupid court has entered with its deference to copyright owners!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Almost none are granted cert.
Oral arguments will be heard in about 100 cases.
About 50-60 cases will be disposed of without argument. The Justices Caseload
When someone produces a speech, or writes a paper, few would argue that that someone shouldn't have some kind right of ownership on the work.
I guess I'm one of those few people you're talking about, then. After all, given that all unpublished works are the common property of all people (i.e. we all have the right to think and express ideas), I don't see why the act of discovery, and especially, publication, should grant ownership to what was previously public property. To me, copyright law amounts to little better than outright theft from the public commons.
We specifically exempt pure science, mathematics, and other areas of "natural law" from copyright, for the public good.
Given that the discovery of the right notes and turn of phrase to create a popular book, song, or movie script is really just applied human psychology, I don't see why there are special rules for these (poorly understood) branches of science.
Why am I suddenly in violation of a law if I play 3 notes that I've heard before? That's an unjust limitation on my freedom, I think. I don't think the counterargument in favour of copyright is very strong.
The argument in favour of granting a monopoly right is usually one of pure economic incentive: "no one would creat things without copyright law". I'm unconvinced that the state is incapable of granting a financial incentive without granting a monopoly that limits my rights to free expression. I'm further unconvinced that artists, sculptors, and painters would stop pursuing their passions merely because they weren't guaranteed a monopoly right. Lack of copyright doesn't seem to stop scientists or mathematicans from deriving the most wonderful of formulas for us to understand the universe with.
Copyright, as a concept, is severely limiting. We need several kinds of exceptions just to make the idea close to workable. After all, under a strict interpretation of copyright, I can't take a photograph of the same object as you did, because you did it first, so the monopoly is yours. In fact, I can't take a photograph of any manufactured propery I may have purchased, because the design is held copyright by the manufactuer. I can't even alter any purchased propery that I now own without creating a "derivative artistic work" based upon the changes to the original manufactured work. I couldn't live if copyright were strictly enforced, without limitations.
That suggests to me that the notion is flawed: if severe limitations need to be placed upon an otherwise fundamentally draconian law just to make it tolerable, the notions upon which it is founded seem quite suspicious to me. I prefer laws that start by granting freedom, and then limit it only when absolutely necessary for the public good. I'm crazy that way.
--
AC