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Hip hop, sampling, and copyright infringement. [1]

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Date: 2022-07-24

Good evening, everyone!

I thought I would start with a thread from Twitter.

x Hola, the unroll you asked for: https://t.co/nm2FAd2vBa Share this if you think it's interesting. 🤖 — Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) July 24, 2022

Maybe I will put the thread in blocks for more clarity.

x Just watched a documentary about sampling and it's legality. One of the common talking points of people thinking it should be illegal is that sampling music takes less effort than creating new music. I have multiple problems with this. Thread — Dollar Country (@dollarcountry) November 18, 2021

x First of all, making music from sampled material requires a gigantic amount of time, effort, and skill. To suggest that it takes less effort is like saying that people who write songs featuring guitar are less valid because they didn't invent the guitar. — Dollar Country (@dollarcountry) November 18, 2021

x Second of all, the amount of effort that goes into the making of something does not measure it's worth or value.



The idea that a hip hop artist "stole" from someone is like saying Zeppelin "stole" from Les Paul because they both used A flat scales. — Dollar Country (@dollarcountry) November 18, 2021

x Third of all, ALL music is sourced from the world. Literally EVERYTHING. The same way ALL art is sourced from the world, and ALL ideas are sourced from our experiences and previous things. Some are closer than others, but the idea that sampling de facto isn't creation is bogus — Dollar Country (@dollarcountry) November 18, 2021

x In before someone brings up someone sampling 30 seconds of a song or a guitarist literally stealing a whole riff. — Dollar Country (@dollarcountry) November 18, 2021

I thought about doing a diary about hip hop, sampling, and copyright infringement for a while; it took listening to a few songs from my teenage years to inspire this piece.

Here’s song number one.

Yes, that was EPMD with "You Gots To Chill"; you also hear "More Bounce to the Ounce" from Zapp looped with the horn section out of "Jungle Boogie" from Kool and the Gang.

Here’s song two.

The song is Ice Cube's "Bop Gun"; you also heard Parliament Funkadelic's "One Nation Under a Groove".

Is anyone noticing a pattern? Those songs contained samples from funk music groups.

Sampling is when a portion of a song is reused in a song like a guitar riff, a horn section, or a computerized voice, and is used in another musical work.

That Twitter thread at the very beginning of this story puts into words how I feel about sampling; it’s using someone else’s creativity.

When you sample music without the express permission of the artist, the music label that owns the master recording, or the estate of the artist, that would be entering into copyright infringement. That means a lawsuit and paying of the monies due.

I found this website, Cohn LG, to be helpful in the process to avoid copyright infringement.

Here’s an excerpt from that website.

Sometimes a sample may be short enough in length or incorporated in such a way, so that it constitutes “fair use” or “de minimus” sampling. Unfortunately, while fair use is an exception to copyright law, it is not a highly reliable defense, as a judge or jury will ultimately decide whether your use falls within the parameters of the fair use doctrine as prescribed by the courts. Artists should consult a music and entertainment attorney in order to evaluate the risks associated with their specific use and the degree to which they would have a viable defense if the matter were brought before a court of law.

I’m sure Vanilla Ice could have used this advice before his appearance on television.

Here he is explaining what exactly happened.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/24/2112293/-Hip-hop-sampling-and-copyright-infringement

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