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

On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 08:19:55PM +0100, Jim Peters wrote:
> 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.

How often does a sampling artist provide the source code from which a
work was created?  One normally listens to object code, as it were.

I imagine that even as we speak, one bright sampler with a friendly
lawyer will be telling the world "I've ripped off three albums here
but I'm not going to tell which" and then relying on innocent until
proven guilty.  One bright mathematician will be trying to find a way
to "prove" that (e.g.) Metallica's latest albums contains samples of
Britney's first, just for a laugh.

I don't know the background to this story.  Has anyone linked it to
the Madonna remixes?  I'm rather fond of "Beatallica - Leper Madonna"
but I can't imagine Metallica or Madonna are.

> A question: Have the bad guys always been this bad?

Yes, maybe worse, but mostly they stuck to other lines of work.
History seems to be full of bad guys, plus another bunch of people
managing to carry on with life anyway.

> Has ownership ever been pushed so far and enforced so rigidly
> before?  Or is this something special to our times?

Since how long has there been big money in ownership, and an even
larger amount of perceived money?

Suppose the bottom were to fall out of the music market and your
average teenager was perfectly content listening to beats generated
entirely at random by (e.g.) a piece of public domain software.

Would the lawyers leave music alone?  Seems likely.  Would the cost be
too high? I think so.


Hopefully you can rescue a useful idea from under the smothering
cynicism and fuzzy thinking.

Matthew  #8-)