Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rotrux 2515 days ago
> "I wonder at what point similarities with past works becomes inevitable."

This question gets at the crux of the problem; its answer depends entirely on "what are the atomic constituents of a musical work?"

With consensus around a legal catalog of sounds, you could use reasonable assumptions to estimate a year by which all musicians have a 99.999% chance of being dirty-dirty infringing criminals.
1 comments
winternett 2515 days ago
I worry about the future as I own a record label as well. I think the period that works go into public domain should be 10 years instead of the current 75... If you think about it, music releases usually make most of their money within the first 10 years of release, and then after that they may become classics, but then people who want to find the music generally seek the originals. Remixing can also make the original songs popular again, so labels need to really account for that before suing. 75 years ago most recording technology was not even good enough to generate anything worth sampling.

Courts should also be more fair in awarding damages and follow-up royalties. All of the restrictions on copyright for sampled music really stifle the possibilities when it comes to music making.

What driving all of this at the end of the day is that big money wins... Big labels and artists get to sample whoever they want and just pay out a small percentage of the proceeds later on and tunes are even made more popular by sample controversies like this one, while the little people not only get ignored by radio, magazines, and music outlets, but then you won't even hear them because flagged samples in their work prevent them from even posting their music anywhere.

I did a remix of Beautiful Girls by Sean Kingston and can't post it anywhere because of copyright flags when I try to upload it and give proper credits... The original came out long ago and now is probably past the sales hump. Played it out once on a club night and it was a hit there... It's just sitting on my Hard Drive forever... Never to be heard.

link