Sampling and legalities

uh boohoo. Dont listen to RIAA madness. Just EQ your sounds a bit and it belongs to you, legally.

Or if it doesnt, I will for sure make track with every preset from roland/korg/kurzweil/virus... and then no one can use those synths because I OWN the sounds, cause they are used in my track. Then I can proceed to sue everyone. I can already see the maker of 4:21 (that is the silent song?), sueing anyone who uses any silence (anywhere on the sound spectrum) because of copyrights, making only white noise "legal music" but he sure should make a track of that too...

Yea obviously I am talking about the core samples of synth manufs. not (necessarily) the presets.

Did you just say "legally"? Are you a lawyer? No? Well, my ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER says you're dead wrong.

Might you get away with it? Yeah, probably. Is there legal precedent to keep you from getting your ass handed to you in court? Emphatically no.

Mod note: I split this from the Mix Trix thread to keep it clean and wonderful.

Now knock yourselves out as you like.

Audacity: which case has provided legal precedent? Just curious, I'd like to check it out. I studied copyright law in college.

There are lots and lots of them. An example: Jeff Lynne (ELO) wasnt allowed to use a real phone ring in the song "Telephone Line", he had to make his own.

Really, really, really bad advice. Complete and utter nonsense.

The two golden rules of copyright:

1. If you make money, someone else wants it.

2. The team with the expensive lawyer always wins.

Someone has a bad lawyer

I believe that the following is what started it all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Feet_High_and_Rising

The Turtles sued De La Soul and Tommy Boy over the allegedly unauthorized sampling (the original is looped, slowed down and played backwards) of "You Showed Me" on "Transmitting Live from Mars". An out of court settlement was reached without admission of liability by the defendants.

Got a link for this? I Googled, but came up with nothing.

Sounds suspicious to me. Who would have sued ELO over a telephone ring? The manufacturer of the telephone?

If that sample was a phrase, then I completely understand. That's not what I was asking about.

Audacity was referring to single drum hits at the top of this thread. Then he said "scratch that...legal precedent" etc.

So I was wondering where the legal precedent came from regarding single drum hit samples.

My source is Jeff Lynne. I played with ELO and he said it during the show.

Back then, you couldnt own a phone, the phone company owned it.

My source is Jeff Lynne. I played with ELO and he said it during the show. Back then, you couldnt own a phone, the phone company owned it.

Oh, I know. My grandmother was still "renting" her rotary dial phone from AT&T well into the late 80s. She wasn't supposed to, and didn't need to, but the phone company conveniently "forgot" to let her know that, or take it off her bill.

Still, meaning no disrespect to you or Mr. Lynne, I see absolutely no legal recourse for the phone company if you used the ring in a song. They own the patent for the device and the copyright for the design, but they do not own my recording of its ring if I set a microphone and tape machine next to it and hit "record".

I'll see if I can find it, but it was in the past two years, and it was significant in that it upheld Newton v. Diamond and Others 349 F.3d 591, where this happened (IIRC):

and then there's GIRL TALK.

It's kind of dumb IMHO, but every single little bitty bit of music that you sample is under copyright -- *even* if you twist it into something unrecognizable.

Practically, this turns the usage of samples into a guessing game. The questions to ask are as follows:

Will anyone ever ever EVER clearly recognize the sample?

If not, you can probably use the sample without attribution. A single drum hit is *really* difficult to pick out for instance.

But be aware, we live in an era where people catch rap artists ripping off f'n chip tunes. Some people have good ears.

The other question:

Are you making enough money off of said sample (or is said song with a sample "newsworthy") for lawyers to give a {censored}?

If you aren't making any money off of your music, let's face it, lawyers aren't going to care too much. Unless you actually start making money. Or get in the news somehow. If so, then look out.

So, sample at your own risk. The laws are pretty tight these days.

My understanding (possibly wrong) of this is that, when you *re-record* a song part as a "sample", that's essentially similar to performing a cover. In which case, you get the mechanical rights from someone like Harry Fox. You do *not* need the master use rights.

As you said, the reverse is true for short samples that aren't recognizable as part of the composition: you *only* need the master use rights then, not the mechanical rights. You need both if the sample is long enough to be recognizable as the composition.

As you also implied, in 99.9% of cases, nobody cares because no money is flowing around. I'd only worry about sampling if you start getting popular.

Girl Talk gets away with it, in part, because he's aligned with a label of anti-copyright activists / sound collagers. After the U2/Negativland deal, I think that the big guns shy away from these folks because the negative publicity far outweighs any monetary gain.

I hate how making bad beats gets the pretentious title "Sound Collage".

ugghh...

I'd like to know where Daft Punk gets all their samples cleared from:

Well, by that logic all sampling is legal. If you have a microphone next to a Nintendo game playing Super Mario Bros, I doubt you can just "tape it". Yeah, I agree that it does sound strange that a phone ring could be copyrighted, but the phone company of the past was pure evil.

I cant think of any older songs that have a phone ring. The one in "Uncle Albert" is fake.

Correct, because master use rights only cover the original recordings, not the songs themselves.

And you're also right that one could conceivably go to Harry Fox if they re-performed the sample. However, Harry Fox deals almost exclusively with covers, and unless you're willing to give up all rights to and all future earnings from the music (aside from performance royalties and maybe producer points), you'll have to deal with the publisher and negotiate a usage contract.

And as many songs have multiple publishers, this can get pretty hairy, especially if one publisher doesn't want to play nice.

Yep, but it should be stressed that despite popular opinion, there's no objective measurement on how short the sample has to be. Unfortunately, the utterly ridiculous "four second" myth won't die.

hmmm ,.. "Don't Hang Up" by 10cc

Oh no, I was going to make millions using a sampled kick and snare. Why bother now!!!

True, simply because there are few, if any specific laws regarding sampling. There are only precedents, and those precedents govern whether or not someone suing you will win... and if so, how much they'll win.

That's why these lawsuits are so tricky. One judge gets a bug up his ass, and it affects the outcome for everyone.

I'd really like to know this too. Because they don't even chop their samples. Just play a processed loop. Which is fine by me .. I just mean how does a group that popular get away with that?

There are 2 instances where I am fairly sure that people used straight patterns off the Korg EMX (one was a pretty popular song as well)...I would love to see if they sue for infringement.

Hello your Honor...I here I have evidence to show the plaintiff is full of carp (fires up EMX).

No no no .. any groovebox pattern should be fair game.

I remember hearing a random Cure remix in the 90's that was straight off a MC-303.

On the contrary I remember an MC-303 pattern that was a total rip-off of Aphex Twin's "Polynomial-C" and one was even Momus' "Rhetoric"