A question of the legality of sampling.

[jimmusician Profile]

So basically I watched RIP!: A Remix Manifesto and its gotten me all wrapped around the idea of fair use. Basically, Girl Talk, the famous mashup artist, can release prettymuch whatever the fuck he wants, but faces the legal issues involved with copyright. Thats clear to me. The thing is.....what IS the limit? What IS the public domain. Say I took a second long excerpt from a guitar solo, mashed it up, re-ordered it, pitched it up down backwards, etc.......granted there must be a copyright on this portion of property, ........but if noone can figure out what I used, who the fuck will investigate, much less care? Plus, what about dudes online that spend their time listening to drums in metal/punk/whatever albums and taking the time to collect one-shots? Are they REALLY going to suffer any consequence in the long run? My initial guess is no.

So I guess the question is.......what really makes fair use so unfair because part of it is that someone's "intellectual property" (means jack shit considering there are thousands of records out now) is the origin?

I'm really just fucking STUMPED on what is "FAIR" these days......

[divtech Profile Website]

i measure it as a gradient rather than at a specific point where you draw the line, while stealing a one-shot is still a form of copying someone elses music, it is very low on the spectrum when compared to, for example, sampling a 14sec guitar solo into your track

[DJ DL-44 Profile Website]

The law is dumb, the idea of intellectual property is dumb, release seven inches you stole from stores with your name written on them in magic marker.

[jimmusician Profile]

i measure it as a gradient rather than at a specific point where you draw the line, while stealing a one-shot is still a form of copying someone elses music, it is very low on the spectrum when compared to, for example, sampling a 14sec guitar solo into your track

so in terms of gradient (or slope, since thats what the actual definition focuses on), the sample is measured by the impact it has on the track perhaps rather than the length?

Say for instance, I took this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yFH7oCxsOI Late for the Sky. Jackson Browne is corny for a breakcore (or any core track, for that matter) but the beginning two seconds, featuring the piano chord opening accompanied by the guitar grace note, and then a held note by the guitar. Say I took that portion, and basically fucked with it for a bit, plastered it across the piano board in all registers and variations..........is that really discriminable? OR, do I have to do something to make it my own like re-eq it, combine the sample with a copy of itself thats shifted up a tritone's interval, and THEN use it?

SURE, its plagiarism, but the thing is......after a while who can protest it if I used it for an entirely different context than the one it was used in? I guess the thing is, if your entirely conscious that you can be "caught" by the copyright laws, and use a sample in a fucked up way to add something to your track, ............where is the law going to apply? Because I can say, after using it, that the original piece of audio represents NOTHING of what originally made it recognizeable.

What about with windows operating system sounds?

[SweetPeaPod]

sampling movies and or musicals is a huge no no.
isn't there some kinda 3 sec rule?

[jimmusician Profile]

sampling movies and or musicals is a huge no no.
isn't there some kinda 3 sec rule?

is it really? I've heard samples from all sorts of movies sampled...Never heard about any trouble bands have had.

There SHOULD be some sort of ANY second rule, but supposedly the only rule is anything you ever want to use has to be public domain (75 years or so I think?)

[SweetPeaPod]

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-sampling/2004-April/000257.html

[miike Profile]

if you press under 1000 copies your usually fine

[ohmega sir Profile]

sampling movies and or musicals is a huge no no.
isn't there some kinda 3 sec rule?

you can sample up to 2.7 seconds of anything because it doesnt count as intellectual property yet because its about or less than 1bar of music that could be from anything and going on what miike said unless you are a huge label or artist you can prob press up to about 10 000 copies before it would be worth the copyright owner suing you because unless you are making a shit load of money you would just be declared bankcrupt and they would have spent more on legal fees than the cash they could ever hope to get back

[AfA62 Profile Website]

you can sample up to 2.7 seconds of anything because it doesnt count as intellectual property yet because its about or less than 1bar of music

It depend on the bpm, you can make 10 millisecond long bar if you want

[helix Profile Website]

unless you suddenly become uber famous in the music industry no one will ever know, im sure v snares didnt get permission for all sample robbery and he is as big as you can get in breakcore terms.....hell, hip hop is defined by stealing samples and putting drum loops over them!! listen to entroducing by dj shadow, the majority of the melodies and drum loops on there are stolen...as long as you do something creative with it, it doesn't matter

[AfA62 Profile Website]

unless you suddenly become uber famous in the music industry no one will ever know, im sure v snares didnt get permission for all sample robbery and he is as big as you can get in breakcore terms.....hell, hip hop is defined by stealing samples and putting drum loops over them!! listen to entroducing by dj shadow, the majority of the melodies and drum loops on there are stolen...as long as you do something creative with it, it doesn't matter

+1

[Warpsmasher Profile WebsiteYIM]

Good thread. I've given a lot of thought to this subject in the past. I think if you're using pieces of guitar solos and turning them into new solos (I did a bit of that on my first album), nobody is really going to know or care where the source audio came from. Making sampled sounds unrecognizeable from the original doesn't take much. Now that we have youtube, there is an infinite amount of sample material out there, and no one is ever going to be able to place where it came from unless you want them to be able to, and you make your use of a sample really obvious, like in, say, Vsnares' "Koonut-Kaliffee". Doing it that way makes the statement of 'yes I used these clips from Star Trek season 2 episode 1, and I don't give a fuck if it's illegal' - a hallmark of electronic music in general, especially in the underground. Mangling something up until it doesn't sound like it used to doesn't really make any such statement, it just makes a new sound and nobody will know where it came from.

I wonder how much an artist can sell digitally via itunes/amazon/bandcamp/beatport/etc before the sample's copyright owners decide they want a piece...

[sosenco Profile]

................

[JonnyRotic Profile Website]

The law is dumb, the idea of intellectual property is dumb, release seven inches you stole from stores with your name written on them in magic marker.

This, this, a million times this.