[Rumori] New sampling ruling?

[matt davignon]

Is this new news? I just saw it referenced in another email on the 
microsound list.


http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=43259
Home  >  News & Opinion  >  National News

Court: Pay to use song 'samples'
By Jennifer Rosinski
Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Pay up or don't play it, that's what the federal appeals court ruled 
yesterday in ordering performers to compensate artists whose work they've 
sampled.
     The ruling handed down in Cincinnati, Ohio, goes further than previous 
lower court rulings that ordered performers to pay when they sample another 
artists' work.
     This decision by a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of 
Appeals ruled that it is illegal even to rip off musical snippets that no 
one would recognize. The court said federal laws aimed at stopping piracy of 
recordings applies to digital sampling.
     ``If you cannot pirate the whole sound recording, can you `lift' or 
`sample' something less than the whole? Our answer to that question is in 
the negative,'' the court said. ``Get a license or do not sample. We do not 
see this as stifling creativity in any significant way.''
     Some said the decision to outlaw sampling just one note or chord may be 
too restrictive for rap and hip-hop artists who often rhyme over music taken 
from older recordings.
     ``It seems a little extreme to me,'' James Van Hook, dean of Belmont 
University's Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business, told the 
Associated Press. ``When something is identifiable, that is the key.''
     The case, one of at least 800 lawsuits filed in Nashville over lifting 
music snippets, centers on the NWA song ``100 Miles and Runnin' '' and its 
use of a three-note guitar riff from ``Get Off Your Ass and Jam'' by '70s 
funk-master George Clinton and Funkadelic.
     In the two-second sample, the guitar pitch has been lowered, and the 
copied piece was ``looped'' and extended to 16 beats. The sample appears 
five times in the new song.

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