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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?
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.
Dice are not limited to 6 sides.
Then again, I don't see mention of a d2... the rolling of which is essentially a coin toss.
The unofficial
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..)
If it didn't before, it does now.
Cowry shells or coins may be used as a kind of two-sided dice ("d2"). (In the case of cowries it is questionable if they yield a uniform distribution.)
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)
AFAIK, the Supreme Court is looking at how it is interpreted and if it complies with the Bill of Rights, etc. If it doesn't, they have the power to throw the bill (or parts of it) out, as has been done in the past.
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. >:-)
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