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The Courts Government Media Music News

Supreme Court Asked To Reverse Music Sampling Case 34

Posted by michael from the living-in-clip dept.
CaptainEbo writes "In Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the Sixth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals eliminated the 'de minimis' exception for copyright in sound recordings, which allows artists to sample small amounts from earlier work to produce new creations. The defendants in this case have now asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Also involved in this suit are civil rights vetrans from the Brennan Center for Justice and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Both have filed an amicus brief urging that the Sixth Circuit decision be reversed. 'The Court of Appeals decision to target trivial borrowing from sound recordings isn't supported by copyright law or sound policy,' says Marjorie Heins, coordinator of the Free Expression Policy Project at the Brennan Center. 'It ignores the history and purpose of the Copyright Act and stifles creativity.'"
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Supreme Court Asked To Reverse Music Sampling Case More

Supreme Court Asked To Reverse Music Sampling Case

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  • Now we can't mix in someone elses music into our own?

  • Interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 )
    If "trivial borrowing from sound recordings isn't supported by copyright law" then we can start copying pop music like there was no tommorow. Gentlemen, start your Pirate2Pirate applications! But seriously, wouldn't it render the new Creative Commons Sampling Plus License [creativecommons.org] irrelevant? Any lawyers here?
    • I suspect you misread the court. I think, without having read the opinion in detail, that what they mean by this statement is that, since copyright law makes no provision for even trivial borrowing, that such should not be legal in the eyse of the courts as a de mimimus exception.

      That being the case, the Creative Commons license should still have value. Then again, any license that has express terms is going to have more value by reducing the risk associated with hoping a sample is small enough that YOUR
      • If "de minimus" means some [subjective and arbitrary] threshold of borrowing of the wave form [as opposed to just the melody or perhaps the MIDI] then sound fonts are also off limits. Would that mean that companies like Roland and Alesis will join RIAA [or at least be in a legal position to join] in a crusade to eradicate forms of "piracy" that amount to less than a few hundred miliseconds of a .WAV file? You'd have to place a realtime correlation filter athwart all media streams and use it to trigger DRM
  • While I understand that an artist doesnt want his music used without their permission, sampling has provided such a wealth of music that it would be a great loss. Both are important issues.

    I guess theres also a copyright extension issue, as music has too long of a copyright to enter the public domain, where you can sample the entire song legally.

    I guess I'd allow sampling without copying the entire song, how you gauge that would be hard.

    Interesting indeed.

  • quoth & misquoth (Score:5, Insightful)

    by evilmousse ( 798341 ) on Friday January 21, 2005 @08:08PM (#11437621) Journal
    When someone produces a speech, or writes a paper, few would argue that that someone shouldn't have some kind right of ownership on the work.

    When someone coins a phrase, do they gain ownership of the phrase? of course not.

    Noone is allowed to reproduce the text of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech and claim it as their own.
    EVERYONE has the right to include the phrase "I have a dream" in direct reference to MLKjr, in indirect reference to anything relating to him, and in contexts completely irrelevant to him. Frankly, I'd say it is property of the culture, in the most basic sense: more than the author's original words & intentions are invested into the meaning of the phrase: also invested are the hearts and minds of the people who were however subtly changed by it, and the culture they built upon it. I won't claim to know how to legislate that last part...

    Anyway, the current music copyright as property over every infintessimally small component of music can NEVER work. Music is made of notes, Books and speeches of words. Somewhere between the componant and the comprised is where the MEANING of the work is reached, and that is the scale at which to begin protecting.

    open source music NOW!

    (I can go on for hours about how culture is only getting MORE self-referential and just meta in general, so this is really restraining myself..)
    • When someone produces a speech, or writes a paper, few would argue that that someone shouldn't have some kind right of ownership on the work.

      Why? What basis is there for such a claim? I don't necessarily disagree, but let's not treat it as a given. There needs to be a good reason.
      • Why? What basis is there for such a claim (that "there needs to be a good reason")? I don't necessarily disagree, but let's not treat it as a given.

        Not every discussion needs to begin with first principles, especially not the sort to be found on /.
        • What basis is there for such a claim (that "there needs to be a good reason")?

          Copyright is artifical. Surely all laws must have a good reason to exist, lest they infringe upon our freedoms unjustifiably.

          Not every discussion needs to begin with first principles, especially not the sort to be found on /.

          I agree, but it's a good idea to bear them in mind whenever we're thinking about problems with the current law and possible replacements.
          • ahahahaha --WOW-- i've already been defended by a lawyer somehow more libertarian about IP than ME!

            it's really nice to meet you ^^ if it happens to catch your interest, i could really use some informed (nonprofessional of course) thoughts on a project [wikipedia.org] i'm working on regarding some old blues tunes.
    • Good point.

      It would be nice if there was music search engine you could put a riff into and see if, say, the base line for Under Pressure actually appears in, say, a Mozart Fugue.

      my google-foo is not strong enough to get past the MP3 download sites...
      • "my google-foo is not strong enough to get past the MP3 download sites..." Nobody's is. However, other than being UNBELIEVABLY covered in advertisements, MP3Search.com [mp3search.com] is a music search engine of sorts, however, it doesn't allow you to enter an actual riff, just an musician or a title.

        It's still quite interesting.
      • I think it's worth pointing out that that would be a publishing copyright, not a recording copyright, and the case being discussed here is a recording copyright one.

        It's the difference between using the same notes that Mozart used, and sampling the actual sound of the berlin symphony orchestra playing that pices of music. Mozart's copyright on the sequence of notes has expired, but the copyright on that particualr recording has not.

        In this case, the piece of music was so trivial (a single 3 note chord) th


      • BRILLIANT!!!

        i thought that article a week or so ago for an enter-an-image searchengine was too far-fetched to be created any time soon, but i bet a music one would be possible..

        shit, what's that type of compression called where repeating patterns are identified, given numbers, and then just store the number and one copy of the pattern... anyway, since the compression works that way, it would be just one step more to index that info searchably..

        how would the interface work though? it would definetly need

  • I was thinking about borrowing small fractions of copyrighted works without permission for the last few days, and I suspect that it is legal, given that fractions are small and therefore meaningless.

    Could it be the pirate's last and true hope? (I came to be fond of the pirate label, as it invokes images of booty and governors' daughters.) Seriously, stay with me for a moment. Take music. Suppose, we take samples so miniscule that it would be insane to claim ownership over them, and imbed them into public

  • 7,000 cases reach the Supreme Court each year.

    Almost none are granted cert.

    Oral arguments will be heard in about 100 cases.

    About 50-60 cases will be disposed of without argument. The Justices Caseload [supremecourtus.gov]

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