[fzzzy]

Artists who make a lot of money commonly voluntarily license samples they use which are not used in a highly transformative way. Artists who were sampled by artists who did not license the sample may get some lawyers and threaten to sue. The threatened artist may settle.

For any cases that do make it to court, copyright generally only covers works in their entirety and quoting is explicitly allowed under fair use. The four tests used to determine fair use are length of the quote; whether the allegedly infringing use is for commercial or nonprofit uses; whether the allegedly infringing use interferes with the sales of the original work; and the nature of the quoted work (for example, facts are not copyrightable).

(This commentary is us-centric; other countries have different rules)

[philipwhiuk]

You're intentionally blurring the line between quoting, which is a single small piece of the whole, and sampling, which generally takes large quantities albeit split up.

People license stuff because they'd lose. Fair use isn't nearly as broad as most people think.

> In 1991, the songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan sued the rapper Biz Markie after Markie sampled O'Sullivan's "Alone Again (Naturally)" on the album I Need a Haircut. In Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc, the court ruled that sampling without permission infringed copyright. Instead of asking for royalties, O'Sullivan forced Markie's label Warner Bros. to recall the album until the song was removed.

As much as it was made out to be anti-hip hop, it was really anti-copyright abuse.

[hn_acker]

> You're intentionally blurring the line between quoting, which is a single small piece of the whole, and sampling, which generally takes large quantities albeit split up.

I don't think it's generally true that sampling takes large quantities. I think it's just as often or even more often the case that sampling takes a small quantity from the original song and uses it multiple times in the new work. A 2-second trumpet hit here. 7 seconds of a drumbeat there [1]. In the 1980s and 1990s, the devices for sampling could only sample a few seconds at a time anyway [2]:

> The E-mu SP-1200, released in 1987, had a ten-second sample length and a distinctive "gritty" sound, and was used extensively by East Coast producers during the golden age of hip hop of the late 1980s and early 90s.[40]

Even though a significant portion of the new work's audio uses the old song, the expression in the use of the sample is predominantly the remixer's expression, not the expression of the author of the original song.

At least before sampling cases like the Grand Upright case [3] you mentioned, hip hop sampling usually consisted of taking small pieces from many different songs and making a new song out of all of those small parts. Again, the vast majority of the expression is the remixer's, yet the remixer is the one who loses in court.

Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. (1991) [3] was a judicially dubious case in my opinion:

> Judge Duffy has been accused of bias in admonishing the defense and referring the defense for criminal prosecution.[2] Such criticism points out that Duffy's written opinion begins with one of the biblical ten commandments, "Thou shalt not steal." According to The Copyright Infringement Project of UCLA Law and Columbia Law School, Judge Duffy's opinion in Grand Upright v. Warner demonstrates "an iffy understanding on the part of this judge of the facts and issues before him in this case."[2]

And then there's the even more dubious case Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films (2005) [4]:

> The case centered on the 1990 N.W.A. track "100 Miles and Runnin'", which contains a manipulated two-second sample of the 1975 Funkadelic track "Get Off Your Ass and Jam".

> Bridgeport brought the issue before a federal judge, who ruled that the incident was not in violation of copyright law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed the decision and ruled that the sampling was in violation of copyright law. Their argument was that with a sound recording, an owner of the copyright on a work had exclusive right to duplicate the work. Under this interpretation of the copyright law, usage of any section of a work, regardless of length, is in violation of copyright unless the copyright owner gave permission. In its decision, the court wrote: "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."[1]

The Sixth Circuit in Bridgeport ignored that copyright is about expression [5] and not just about copying.

If you see bracket citations within quote paragraphs then ignore them. They are in-line citiations copied from Wikipedia, and I keep them in for ctrl-F purposes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Common_sample...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Hip_hop

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Upright_Music%2C_Ltd._v.....

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeport_Music%2C_Inc._v._Di...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...