From: eric@muttley.ucsd.edu (Eric Lyon)
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.synth,rec.music.synth,rec.music.industrial,comp.music
Subject: Re: Make Sampling Legal...
Date: 27 Jan 1993 01:44:35 GMT
Organization: Department of Music, UC San Diego
Distribution: inet
NNTP-Posting-Host: muttley.ucsd.edu

Mason Jones writes:

>Several of you folks are attacking copyrights
>as both a recognition of originality, and as a barrier to creation.
>Personally, I look at copyrights from my own point of view as merely
>protection given my participation in a capitalist society. If I don't
>copyright my works, then I run the risk of someone else appropriating
>it and profiting from it, which I frankly see as unfair.

The use of the word "appropriating" is ambiguous here. If it is taken to mean
"steal", as in make duplicates of someone else's work and distribute copies
commercially, that would certainly be an example of "appropriation" which 
is both unethical, would have a negative economic impact on the original
artist, and is justifiably protected against by current copyright laws.

Most of the discussion here centers around more active forms of "appropriation",
in which the source recordings are transformed or recontextualized
into new art works. It is in this arena where current copyright laws have
caused conderable difficulty for sampling artists. The most publicized cases
are the U2 parody by Negativland and John Osborn's Plunderphonics. Both
are good examples of how the copyright laws can be used as tools of censorship:
in the case of Negativland, the specific intent of the sampling artist is to
lampoon the source artist - a situation in which the sampling artist is very
unlikely to legally get rights to a work which he or she intends to mock. 
In the case of Osborn, the sampling artist is working with thousands of
samples, a situtation in which obtaining the rights becomes financially and
practically infeasable. In both cases, economically disadvantaged artists 
had their art works taken out of circulation by economically priviledged ones
with powerful record companies behind them; this is a use of the copyright 
which many artists find both distasteful and unnecessary.

In the above mentioned examples of "*transformational* appropriation", it would
be difficult to argue that the source artists were economically injured by
being sampled - a successful appropration piece might possibly generate new
interest and sales for the source recording, but it certainly wouldn't harm
sales any more than hash brownies harm the sale of chocolate. The only
question is whether the source artists should get an extra cut, simply for
having been sampled. This is a thorny question but sooner or later we will
have to either decide that once a recording is made available to the
public, it *is* available for further cultural processing, or we will have
to accept a situation in which sampling becomes a thought crime for 
economically underpriviledged artists (note that U2 sampled copiously with
impunity during their Zoo TV tour). We can take the former approach without
eroding the very neccessary ownership rights afforded by the copyright.
We simply test an alleged copyright infringement by whether the new work
functions as a copy of the original and is thus stealing sales.
Under such a system, I could not legally release a CD which contained all
of the music on Michael Jackson's BAD, prefaced by a spoken vocal track
explaining that CDs are overpriced so here's the budget version. However,
I could include in my computer music some excerpts from a Whitney Houston song, 
digitally processed so as to sound like a blood-spurting SRL bulldozer - 
pustulent but identifiable (something I can't now do legally if Ms. Houston's
record company disapproves or wants too much money).

We don't have to throw out copyrights but we do have to limit their
destructive power in the hands of record companies. Otherwise we'll have
a lot more Michael Jackson and a lot less Negativland.
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.synth,rec.music.synth,rec.music.industrial,comp.music