Yeah! Be original, like Led Zepplin!

This debate, imho, is more analogous to whether or not the photoshopped work (from which one would like to make money) includes uncleared clip-art or photos. Fonts in this case I guess would be similar to the sounds one finds in synthesizers and sound-modules (which as far as I know are legal to use in commercial works, unless explicitly restricted).

Everyone can buy a clip-art CD just as musicians and producers can buy sample cds of sounds (essentially buying a license to use those sounds). That’s different than if you’re selling prints of collages you made in photoshop with pictures cut out of magazines or downloaded from someone’s site.

Though as a producer, musician, DJ, and sound engineer, I agree that there has to be a simpler solution than the status quo.

In some works, sampling is pure manipulation of samples.. remixing, editing. Also an art.

Jamming and remixing/editing are highly valued and time honored artistic processes.

It’s funny how the financial world tries to capture life and force it to follow its rules.

Many of the best things in art and life just don’t follow financial structures of ‘fairness’. Especially evolving stuff. It’s like trying to fit kids playing at recess into a financial model. Some “rule oriented” play fits; kids taking turns on a swing or hopscotch. But kids tackling each other, or throwing snowballs, or just having random fun doesn’t fit rule based models at all.

Many kids prefer one model or the other (and probably says a lot about the nature of those kids, and where they’ll end up later in life), or some play both ways.

Seems like live remixing, or live jamming is always going to be at odds with ‘rule based’ play. “That’s not fair, you owe me money” reminds me of “you’re not playing fair” on the playground.. same dynamic of the rambunctious/freeform kids hitting political walls with the rule based players, which seems stiffiling at times.

It’s a continous struggle for the bean counters to try to create a model out of apparently random behavior. But if there’s a buck in it for them, they’ll just keep trying..! Too bad they don’t pick up an instrument and play something instead. Maybe we all should, or get off the stage ;)

The issue has existed since editing of recordings was possible. Extended remixes generally didn’t run into a problem because they were only using one or two recognizable sources. “Tape music” might splice lots of things together but they were usually recorded for the purpose … and the exceptions were generally weird experimental stuff so there wasn’t any money worth chasing nor any audience publishers cared about. Club stuff, because it was being played in only one club at a time, was also viewed as not being worth going after.

But that doesn’t mean the copyright/permissions issues didn’t exist.

Now, one can legitimately ask how a scrap of a recording differs from _performing_ a similar phrase, which has been more accepted. It probably shouldn’t differ. But I believe it does, in that different sets of rights (with different ways of handling them) come into play. And in the past such quotes have been a recognizable reference to the _song_ and have occurred in passing, rather than swiping a hook and making it a core component of the new piece.

Yes, this all needs to get straightened out into something semi-reasonable. But the current state of affairs really shouldn’t surprise anyone. There is now big money involved, and people are going to try to grab as large a share of that as they can.

There really is a simple workaround: Don’t swipe the clip; spend the money to work with a few musicians to recreate something similar. You don’t even have to do so until you’re ready to perform/publish; you can use the original clip as a “scratch track” until quite late in the process.

Yeah, I know, everyone wants to remix the actual recordings, not just the scores and ideas, and keep them right until the recording is out in public. I can’t blame them. But frankly, that’s laziness speaking. If you want to go that way, expect to pay for the privilege; negotiate rights as needed, or work IN ADVANCE to nail down something. Remember, even if mechanical rights *were* applicable to isolated phrases, they only let you create a cover version — so if mechanicals existed for isolated phrases you’d still have to have those re-performed.

Could the situation be better? Sure. Is it going to get there? Not as long as everyone on both sides continues to insist that their past practices should define the new norm, and not until the remixers can offer a payment adequate to make folks relax their established rules.

Meanwhile… Some artists don’t mind being remixed. Some don’t mind if you just make the effort to ASK them. And slowly, an increasing number of artists are retaining more of the rights to their own work, and thus are in a better position to make those decisions without the publisher overriding them. So if someone is serious about sampling rather than simply quoting, there is probably quite enough material — and even quite enough good material — to work with while this all gets resolved. It may not be top-10, but … well, if you’re intent on stealing top-10 licks that’s an implicit recognition that those licks ARE worth more and you have to decide whether you’re willing to pay for ‘em.

Or you can stay noncommercial — which doesn’t give you any protection under the law, but at least makes the rights holders a bit less eager to come after you because your pockets aren’t as deep. I wouldn’t bet against them bring a few “make an example” lawsuits, but some of the early recordings like Plunderphonics got a fair amount of distribution, and it wasn’t only because they deliberately used older source material.

I understand the frustration. But I think the attempts to defend really have gone far over the top, and lost sight of the fact that the best way to win a fight is to find ways to not get into it in the first place.

;)

http://www.homerecordingstudio.ca

((And no, I Am Not A Lawyer. But I’m an amateur musician who plays in a style which does involve a fair amount of parody and remixing along with original works, and who has thus had some reason to consider these issues. My opinions may be completely wrong, but they’re the best conclusions I’ve been able to reach based on input from folks who *do* know what they’re talking about. Please feel free to disagree, though I would hope folks do so from a vantage of at least *some* knowledge to buttress their opinions.))

Paul Boutique is a classic and the reason why the Beasties have not been able to repeat that is the clearance of samples and trying to please the “I don’t like Rap but I like the Beastie Boys” complete BS.

X-Clan To the East Backwards couldn’t be made today either.

It’s ridiculous to even have this conversation, when in various other forms of art, ‘sampling’ has been acceptable for a long time. It’s not like Warhol came up with the graphic design for Campbell Soup cans.

Before sampling, elements of songs were reused all the time as well. You speak a lot of riffs, as if this were the only thing that ever gets sampled – try googling for ‘metal chord progressions’, and see if you cannot find tabs and howto guides for the budding metal guitarist within 2 clicks of your original search. Listen to the two albums mentioned in the post above and see if you think that the only artistic value is found in the samples themselves rather than the way in which they were employed.

Note that big labels get around this “sampling” nonsense by getting musicians to re-record the song (aka cover). It just means the artist (or whoever was the songwriter) gives up a cut (or all) of the songwriting/publishing. Musicians playing the song is different from using the actual sound recording. And I still get paid.

So in conclusion…as an artist that releases music under the CC and encourages folks to share it…I’m totally not ok with someone cutting pieces out and using them in an identifiable manner to make money with out giving me some. Twisting into something totally different is cool as long as *I* can’t tell what it was.

sampling lets some artists do certain things more easily, but good music has been made for 1000nds of years without it.

Are you unaware that many of the melodies and motifs in classical music are folk or popular songs of their own or previous eras? For example, May Her Blest Example Chase from Henry Purcell’s 1692 Ode on the Birthday of Queen Mary is the traditional Scottish song Cold and Raw. Damn that cultural rip-off artist!

Wouldn’t this only be true if the musician was attempting to profit from the samples?

And that is why we get these crazy lawsuits where a single mp3 can be argued up to be a 1000+ of (potential) lost sales, thanks to the network it was made available on.

I still like most of the B-Boys’ other stuff, but Paul’s Boutique is certainly a wonderful work of art. It’s simply a shame that it would be prohibitively expensive to make now. Greed takes over.

You mean the kind of album that couldn’t be distributed legally today. As every boingboing reader knows, plenty of people are making music with uncleared samples.

A-fucking-men to that.

If you’re going to call sampling ‘ripping off’, you may as well call playing an instrument ‘ripping off’ the instrument’s creator.

Music/art has always just continued to build off of tradition. Would you say Beethoven “ripped off” things from Mozart? What if Bob Dylan had threatened to sue Hendrix for playing versions of his songs live? The fact that we now have the ability to *directly* reference or build off of pre-existing works is because we have recordings now.

I am a big supporter of sampling and remix culture. It’s how innovation happens a lot of the time. I think people feeling “ripped off” are kind of missing the point of art in general.