Fair Use and Music

[heidi8]

Today's New York Times has an article about D.J. Girl Talk, whose real name is Gregg Gillis, and whose new album is one of the first mainstream releases to claim fair use in his new album “Feed the Animals,” which he released online at illegalart.net earlier this summer

Comments

[sabaceanbabe]

How ironic. I just posted about NBC Universal blocking a BSG video I uploaded yesterday because of the clips used. And I added morgandawn's posted to my memories just yesterday, too.

[norton_gale]

I haven't searched Westlaw (and am not an IP lawyer), but it's hard to believe that the issue of fair use in sampling has never been addressed by the courts. Bands and DJs have been assembling songs from samples for years. I would think that samples limited to a certain length would be consistent with the law of fair use. Using a sample is not equivalent to commenting on a pre-existing work (like a book review); it's an appropriation, but copyright protection can only extend so far.

EDIT: Oops, meant to comment to main post, not to respond to comment above...

[heidi8]

The cases thus far have dealt with things like a repeated bass line or a set of notes used over and over again, and not with the specific sort of situation we have here, where a large number of different songs are being sampled and re-assembled in a completely different setup. You can look at the notes in the My Sweet Lord case to see the "standard" music copyright infringement case.

What he seems to be doing is more like what early hip hop and rap music did, sampling a number of songs. And into the early 90s there were suits about some aspects of that kind of sampling - there was a case involving a Beastie Boys song which they licensed for the sound recording, but not as a composition (and it didn't get resolved for over ten years).