What I would tell you is to concentrate on making music and leave its legal intricacies to the lawyers. With that said, I would elaborate on a couple of things you mentioned. Any reputable lawyer specializing on entertainment law is not going to rely exclusively on the federal Copyright Act to determine the extent of copyright protection to which a creative work may be entitled. There are three crucial issues that must be fully examined. Firstly, is the work protected by the federal Copyright Act? Secondly, what kinds of protection might state law provide? And finally, are state law protections preempted by federal law? These are difficult questions for a layman to answer and,therefore, should be left to the lawyers. For a general discussion of preemption and federal patent and copyright law see Mark A. Lemley, Beyond Preemption: The Law and Policy of Intellectual Property Licensing, 87 CALIF . L. R EV . 111, 137-42 (1999)(attached as a PDF file).

 

you can also think of it as how many seconds of your song would u like someone to sample without license

 

I'm curious what happened in 2005 (saw it mentionned earlier in the thread), why did it get so strict all of a sudden? And why did you Americans always let stuff like this happen?
Personally, I'm not a fan of relying on long-ish samples, in the case of several artists, it's a sore point. Like, take Portishead, really strong melodies and atmospheres... but wait a minute, most of it is stolen from old 70s records, and many people who listen to Portishead are non-initiated people, they didn't get the implication of the Trip Hop tag (as in "a subgenre of Hip Hop"), they got fooled. When they listen to the music, they'll think "wow, the instrumental, this brass section, is really sweet", not necessarily "Beth is a great singer, the guys are good at programming" as they should.

On the other hand, if it's just a shot or a "microsample", I think it's utter BS, completely absurd, and people should rebel against it. Are we even allowed to do that anymore?

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2022

Sampling without authorisation can infringe a phonogram producer’s rights However, the use of a sound sample taken from a phonogram in a modified form unrecognisable to the ear does not infringe those rights, even without such authorisation.

https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2019-07/cp190098en.pdf

If you use an Sample not modfied you need clearance, otherwise you don't need to at least in the EU.

It started when Kraftwerk took Moses Pelham to court for taking a 2 second Sample.

 

As long as, you are small, nobody cares. If you make so much money from your track that you get noticed by people, you are one of the lucky ones.
I think it happened quite often that a small artist sampled some catchy and "nostalgic" stuff and became big. Then because he can create revenue, the original copyright owners want some of the cake too, but you still got something in comparison to being a small nobody.

You can read the Book from the KLF "The Manual"

 

If you use https://www.whosampled.com/ you can see how many Hit Songs use Samples.

 

Can't find the superior language version (used to watch Tracks every week as a kid), what are they saying?

But what if I become a big rockstar someday?

The other one made about them (The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds) is really great. Didn't read the manual yet, I couldn't find a decent copy.

 

It is in superior language. But you can activate English subs, if you want.

 

You are asking how much you can steal without getting caught? You are telling us you have no passion in creating something no one else has created before through whatever means necessary? Want my honest opinion? Stop doing anything that includes creativity and hard work, change hobby, and find something you are actually passionate about, because you do not have the right mindset to create art, that is my opinion.

 

This thread....

 

I will probably be verbally crucified for saying this but I do not care.

It says a lot when an artist writes something completely all on their own that borrows from nobody and not from any source that is original. Unfortunately, this century is rife with clones because the general population is even less willing to step out of their comfort zone than ever before.

So using samples has become the normality, people identifying with tunes they have heard before that are revamped. Is it bad? I do not even want to attempt to answer that but three things are for sure, it is certainly lacking in true creativity, no true originality and is now a dime-a-dozen.

Find your own identity without someone else's tunes. They can flower it up all they like but it is stealing someone else's creativity whether it is half a second or thirty seconds. It is legalized theft just like Spotify.

 

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Some people in this thread take copyright ludicrously seriously. It's one thing to say "It's legally risky but often creatively valid," and another thing to say "Your art is clone trash if you sample and you should just give up."

Borrowing and stealing is as old as music itself. It's silly to think anyone is creating any of this stuff out of nothing. Sure, sampling can be a more direct sort of use, but there are shades to all of this.

Tell Bernard Parmegiani he's trash for making Pop Eclectic, or DJ Shadow for Entroducing. Or how about we dismiss the entire genre of jungle and massive swaths of hip-hop. Silly stuff.

 

It’s all fun and games until one of your favorite bands releases their album, get sued, and then their label has to recall and destroy said copies and re-release the record without the infringing samples. The songs were cool, by themselves, but the samples gave them that extra je ne sais quoi.

I had a copy of the original release and then listened to the “legal” version. Big difference. I am sure the infringing label paid a pretty penny for the whole debacle. Said band released one more record and it was “Adios” afterwards.

 

As I said before, I'm not fan of full-on sampling, but your take is way too close-minded... No art is born out of a vacuum, the romantic idea of an artist just creating stuff solely through inspiration and skills without borrowing from/looking to the past is pure non-initiated fantasies. "Borrowing" happens way more often than you realize and not just in electronic music, it's called culture.

Yes, it's bad, it makes me cringe so hard when I hear an old hit with a shitty modern beat and an idiot rapping over it on the radio when I go outside.

 

I don't mean to laugh because it's true, it's just the way you worded it and me reading your comment in Cartmans voice in my head cause of your profile pic. Plus Cartman speaking French, lol. This is why I try my best to not sample off of records which is a huge fail because a lot of the breaks I have are lifted directly from someone elses tune and I'm not just talking Amens in the Jungle here.

 

No worries. No offense taken at all. Sampling it’s part of culture, like someone posted earlier. And about remakes, well, it all depends on the execution and your individual taste. Art is, after all, very subjective.

 

Last I read up on it, the answer was 7 seconds before you tread into infringement issues. but... what exactly are you sampling? would it still pack the same punch or better if it were altered? these are serious questions you wanna ask yourself. The slightest alteration may absolve you of any legal ramifications.

I have a few dialogue clips from movies people have forgotten. I'm sure someone could make a big deal out of it if they wanted to but then they'd also be at a loss as i've edited them and made sure not to air an entire feature length film's worth of someone else's audio in my music.

Here's a thought for you... you've isolated the audio from a film, you then slice the portion you'd like to use in your track, then you scrub out all the background and production noise and even further you add a delay and a reverb.

It is no longer the same sample.

or if it's dialogue and a brief pause won't destroy the message you're trying to convey... slice that shit up and space it out.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Nov 23, 2022

Depends on the licensor, dude. Each sample owner creates their own rules on this. There are similarities in the systems used, the metric used at Tracklib is pretty standard, but unless a song is royalty-free, there is no minimum sampling time you can get away with. Often times the publisher will allow small-time commercial publishing for free and only require fees for major placements. But it always depends on the sample and who in particular you happen to be dealing with.

 

I have a lot of music friends for MANY years, all performers, writers, orchestrators, writers who like me, made a great living from it when you could.
They all say the same thing as would Mozart, Hendrix and every other writer if they were alive from history, who did your fantasy implication. You are confusing borrowing with influence, they are NOT the same thing.

Mediocrity steals, creativity uses one's imagination.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Nov 23, 2022

Whatever works for you, there are whole genres based on sampling and they're just as culturally legit as anything else. Even boomer stuff, take David Bowie or Led Zeppelin, gods of music, but also shameless plagiarists, it took people decades to notice, years after these people set the world on fire. Who cares? The stuff they took was just laying around in lesser forms, the people who created it were incapable of giving it a proper vessel.

Just to be clear, to avoid ad hominem, I don't do borrowing that much (besides unconscious influence) and using sample packs like everyone do these days don't scratch the creative itch for me, I just don't get excited if I don't start from zero. I even integrate real guitar in my stuff, even though it's mainly electronic.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Nov 23, 2022