Re: your friendly correspondent from the US presents: Free Sampling Killed by Court of Appeals

Paul Walker wrote:
> > they sound completely different from their original. Previously,
> > if a digital sample wasn't identifiable from it's original it was
> > perfectly legal.
> 
> I don't get it. If it sounds totally different, it's not a sample,
> surely?

I think what they are saying is that if your sound was derived from
the sound on another work, then you are in deep lawyer shit.  How you
define a 'sample' we could argue about forever, but if I take a sound
from another album, slow it right down so it sounds nothing like the
original, or do some other weird processing on it, it is still seen as
derived from the original, even though it is unrecognisable.  It might
take me a great deal of work to synthesise a similar sound by other
means, so the sampling may be an important enabling step in that
process.


A question: Have the bad guys always been this bad?  Has ownership
ever been pushed so far and enforced so rigidly before?  Or is this
something special to our times?

Jim

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