Highest German Court Says Sampling Is Not Copyright Infringement

carol

@lala said:

@carol said:

@lala said:

So one of the things is of value and the other isn't,
because you don't like the method?

Yeah , basically . And your point is ?

My point is how it was created has nothing to do with the value of the work.

That's like saying I dislike photography because it's not drawing.

So on that basis you think there's as much value in dropping an audio sample of a guitar break into Auria , as there is in the original , for example , Dave Gilmour performance and recording ?

[Deleted User]

if you put the guitar into another context I might like it.

I posted Beethoven remixing Mozart before,
if you can't see the value in that I can't help you.

carol

@lala said:
if you put the guitar into another context I might like it.

I posted Beethoven remixing Mozart before,
if you can't see the value in that I can't help you.

You can help me by responding to the example I posted , it's as valid as any .

[Deleted User]

if you put the guitar into another context (play something different to it) I may find it of more value than the original had.

decibelle

My consistent personal experience with people who argue viewpoints similar to the most unsupported, arbitrarily selective, and repetitively unresponsive examples in this thread, is that the probability of any of them producing any audio of their own even remotely (commercially or artistically) successful enough to matter, is zero.

My sample size is >100, which may be too small to be statistically significant in general, but it's plently large enough to comfort and reassure me.

If that makes me a bad person, oh well.

mister_rz

Sampling, seems like everyone is at it, a classical architectural example would be beni hasan, although credit is still not being given to the originals, which is something I frown upon.

pichi

@lala said:
I heard a mashup mix that was really great
It was old d&b mixed with best of the Beatles
That was fun and creative, I was laughing my ass off.

And now we can do this without Paul McCartney crying you are ripping me off and you can't publish this.
This is good for the art

This is not the verdict as I understand it. If you try and sell a tune with big recognizable chunks of Beatles in it you will be sued. Sampling 2 second beats is very different from sampling recognizable melodies etc... Please do not spread false information.

[Deleted User]

@pichi said:

@lala said:
I heard a mashup mix that was really great
It was old d&b mixed with best of the Beatles
That was fun and creative, I was laughing my ass off.

And now we can do this without Paul McCartney crying you are ripping me off and you can't publish this.
This is good for the art

This is not the verdict as I understand it. If you try and sell a tune with big recognizable chunks of Beatles in it you will be sued. Sampling 2 second beats is very different from sampling recognizable melodies etc... Please do not spread false information.

We will see what happens, it's a new situation now.
As I understand it you have to pay but you can publish it. And they can't say you can't. I'm think they didn't say anything about sample length, will have to read the words what they actually said)
(Cover songs are legal too ...)

carol

@lala said:
if you put the guitar into another context (play something different to it) I may find it of more value than the original had.

You can't base an arguement on only selected examples that support your point of view . You said :

" My point is how it was created has nothing to do with the value of the work. "

If this is the case , it should also apply to the Dave Gilmour scenario I mentioned above , but this is not the case

[Deleted User]

https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/DE/2016/bvg16-029.html

Not a word about sample length and they say it doesn't matter if it would be hard to recreate or not

Interesting
They don't say anything fixed its about "little sequences"

They did good work.

supadom

Besides, the last time anything new happened was when they took the amen completely apart in the 90s, since then nothing new happened.

It's either a load of bullocks or your musical pallette needs broadening....possibly both

[Deleted User]

So where are the new styles?
Nothing new after broken beats happened.

theconnactic

@carol said:

p.s. feel free to grab large chunks of Beatles tracks and stick one of those raps that you like over the top , upload it and paste the link on here with your personal contact details , to prove your point that Paul McCartney has no rights over who can use his own music .

Well, well, well. If he lives in Germany...

[Deleted User]

I do.

carol

Go for it , maybe work some Led Zeppelin drum loops and the aforementioned Dave Gilmour guitar break into your value Hey Jude mashup . You can only lose your house once after all .

theconnactic

Seriously, I'm all about protecting content creators, copyrights etc., but I must say Germany's approach to copyright rules are the most reasonable I heard of - this ruling reinforces my belief.

Now compare Germany's laws with the US, where you cannot jailbreak your iPad and Disney's lobby threatens the very existence of public domain, and where stupid lawsuits - usually started by people who never created a thing! - is slowly turning attorneys into the main protagonists of the music industry, and you'll see where decadence is rearing its ugly head.

[Deleted User]

It used to be very bad and restrictive but now it will get better.
In case you don't know "public domain" is an unknown concept in German copyright law ...

They used to sue kindergartens for copying notes from x-mas songs and giving them to the children and all kinds of shit.
You can't see half of what is on YouTube because of GEMA here.

supadom

@lala said:
So where are the new styles?
Nothing new after broken beats happened.

Naughties were all about hybrids. I'm especially fond of mixing up acoustic folk with electronic in a more subtle way. No genres as such but to be honest the whole genre thing rubs me the wrong way. Tunng would be such an example but this exercise is probably pointless since one man's garbage is another's treasure etc.

u0421793

The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu (The Jams [AKA The KLF]) - All You Need Is Love

u0421793

and also
The JAMs (KLF) - The Queen and I

Will

@carol said:

@syrupcore said:

@carol said:
As for the bands mentioned - they started with existing formats ( 50 years ago ) rock and roll or whatever , and took them further .

Precisely like so many modern samplists.

This thread is making me think of the common phrase "I don't like ______, it all sounds the same". Said by many about every genre of music ever. If I'm honest, for me that blank would be filled by modern country music. Same remixed set of chord progressions and same-same vocal style. To my ears.

There's no doubt people are, essentially, sampling in modern country music. They may not be using a machine to capture and loop chunks of recordings but they're copying all manner of stuff—chord progressions, pick ups, drum beats, vamps, guitar sounds, vocal styles, slang words, harmony structures... All the time.

That said, there's also no doubt in my mind that I, due to my own musical and cultural history, am simply missing/not understanding a lot of what so many people (millions!) love about it.

I understand that you're tapping out if this thread but for some reason I still find myself hoping that you'll at least consider the possibility that you have similar biases with regard to electronic sampling and hip hop.

No -1 . I don't have a bias against sampling - I've already pointed out I like some if the original innovators work in this area , and I have no problem with using short samples if they're either my own , copyright free , or the original creator is happy for me to use his work in one if my own tracks

Ok. Guess I didn't need to write the rest of it. Shoulda just jumped to 'bias against sampling.'

As a left leaning Labour voter would I be happy to discover a far right band had grabbed a large chunk of one of my tracks to use in a Tory campaign ? No I bloody wouldn't - regardless if I was being paid or not . A major part of my arguement is that the original artist should have a say over where their music is used and who by .

Do you think Chuck Barry should have been consulted before the Beatles released twist and shout?

@pichi said:
Basing your work on someone else's and actually using the work they created in your own are two different things. No intention of being elitist. They're just not equivalent.

Thank you , you've got the point I was trying to make across much better than I was )

Think that distinction is very very blurry particularly when it comes to the thorny difference between good art and bad art. If someone samples three seconds of a guitar riff from the intro of black metal song and transforms it into the basis of an (objectively) beautiful R&B ballad with it, it would be 'actually using the work they created' to do something totally new and different with it. If a rock vocalist slurs their words based on the way some other rock vocalist is doing it, is that somehow different? Better? To me, it's worse on my own version of this impossibly blurry scale.

Think I said it earlier but I reckon it's worth repeating: Clive Stubblefield, the most known drummer from the James Brown bands, was 'sampled' gajillions of times by drummers and bands long long before there was a device called a sampler. The only reason we're even talking about this is because of the legal teams of record companies in the 80s trying to assert mechanical rights over the recordings owned by those shithead music hating conglomerates.

If it's not obvious, my main issue with threads like these is with the semantics of the word sampling. Musicians sample. Musicians have always sampled and moved on with it to create new things. Sure, some people just bite other people's stuff and they suck and make crap but that doesn't have anything to do with sampling, it has do with sucking. If you don't sample in your music, it's likely completely unlistenable.

carol

@syrupcore said:

Do you think Chuck Barry should have been consulted before the Beatles released twist and shout?

Considering he didn't write it , no

@syrupcore said:

Think that distinction is very very blurry particularly when it comes to the thorny difference between good art and bad art. If someone samples three seconds of a guitar riff from the intro of black metal song and transforms it into the basis of an (objectively) beautiful R&B ballad with it, it would be 'actually using the work they created' to do something totally new and different with it. If a rock vocalist slurs their words based on the way some other rock vocalist is doing it, is that somehow different? Better? To me, it's worse on my own version of this impossibly blurry scale.

Think I said it earlier but I reckon it's worth repeating: Clive Stubblefield, the most known drummer from the James Brown bands, was 'sampled' gajillions of times by drummers and bands long long before there was a device called a sampler. The only reason we're even talking about this is because of the legal teams of record companies in the 80s trying to assert mechanical rights over the recordings owned by those shithead music hating conglomerates.

If it's not obvious, my main issue with threads like these is with the semantics of the word sampling. Musicians sample. Musicians have always sampled and moved on with it to create new things. Sure, some people just bite other people's stuff and they suck and make crap but that doesn't have anything to do with sampling, it has do with sucking. If you don't sample in your music, it's likely completely unlistenable.

As I've said previously , I don't see any value in dropping a large chunk of another artists recorded audio into a DAW compared to the effort , time and money used to create the original . And I think if you're going to use a recognisable piece of another artists work , permission should be sought first

u0421793

Funnily enough this came up in a discussion elsewhere for me recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He's_Gonna_Step_on_You_Again
John Kongos 1971 hit He's Gonna Step on You Again is cited in the Guinness book of records as being the first song to have used a sample (but reading the wikipedia page, it was not).

(turn this one up extra loud!)

supadom

I'm using loads of YouTube sampled material within Samplr. Most, if not all of it is totally scrambled using the ebow or the arp modes. I'm not planning to properly release anything right now but if I did I'd be very tempted to re-record (re-create) some of it just in case, even if none of it is actually recognisable.

Lifting whole riffs off songs without permission of the owner just ain't right IMO

Will

Po'ing out but here's a couple of examples of entire chunks of another artist's recorded works repurposed wholesale to beautiful effect. Indeed, made considerably better imo! Long live sampling.

[Deleted User]

Depending what you do with a sample it becomes pretty trivial what the source was,
I sometimes have a feeling I could feed it some random junk without much difference.
If I can't tell anymore what the source was and the creator of the other thing can't recognize his own thing anymore then it must be something new.

JeffChasteen

I nicked a sizeable chunk of work from the notoriously litigious Mr Page for this little ditty:

I haven't heard a word from James Patrick yet.

carol

@lala said:
Depending what you do with a sample it becomes pretty trivial what the source was,
I sometimes have a feeling I could feed it some random junk without much difference.
If I can't tell anymore what the source was and the creator of the other thing can't recognize his own thing anymore then it must be something new.

I haven't got an issue with mangling and chopping a sample into something new , though if you're going to do that why not just make your own thing ? As I've said about 8 million times I don't see value in taking a big chunk of someone else's tune , without their permission , that's still recognisable as the original ( e.g the Under Pressure example ) and passing it off as your own work .

[Deleted User]

No connection with the subject except the property but is it true that if we die and we had an iPad, all our applications are copyrighted and are in fact some rental, our offspring ,children or our parents can not inherit our applications? It Would be fun to see my Mum from the sky playing model 15 or IMPC pro lol .I Saw this on french tv News .Same resonnement for an Arpeggio of a synth presets or a sample of Beathawk or blockwave? Are you sure we can produce and sell music from those apps If everything is only location and copyrighted ? I have existential questions tonight

Will

@grego68 said:
It Would be fun to see my Mum from the sky playing model 15 or IMPC pro lol

I'm listening to some ambient analog synthy music at the moment I read this and the smile that you gave me is still here.