Here’s a terrifying story if you like music. Sampling has been a part of culture since there’s been culture - on a shocking scale in the most easily-checked form, literature, as Google Books is revealing in surprising ways. Paul Collins did a fascinating piece on Slate about how a lot of named authors - Herman Melville lifted whole passages of what would today be called maritime trade mags for descriptions of whaling in Moby Dick, Edgar Allen Poe nicked whole pages of stuff — are being outed by search strings in Google Book seeking a phrase from a famous book only to find it throw up other unexpected references.
But outing a few dead plagiarists, more or less, isn’t going to give the body blow to contemporary mass culture that might be delivered by the sample troll, as detailed in this Tim Wu Slate piece I found reading the one above. You might have heard of patent trolls - basically a lawyer and his dog who buy up old patents and stalk high tech companies to claim that the the new iPod or Blackberry uses a widget that, hmm, looks an awful lot like the one Gustavus Alphonso Jerkenheimer got a patent on in 1903 for his undersea milking machine. Encouraged by these thieves, a new set of lawyers is looking at the music industry.
Fact: under the current copyright climate, Public Enemy would never be able to release It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Thanks to this class of schlomozel, the rights clearance for all those samples would cost more than any amount of revenue that could possibly be made from the album itself. Latest evidence is that Jay-Z is being sued over Justify My Thug, by a shelf company called Bridgeport that bought the rights to old tracks by the King of Interplanetary Funk George Clinton. An Clinton track is sampled in Jay-Z’s song.
Sphere: Related Content
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment