The Musicians Behind One of the Most Sampled Songs in History Finally Got Paid

I watch this documentary every few years because of how well put together it is. The fact that it, itself, is being played on a record is awesome.

People are not copying the composed phrase, they are using the performance directly. The original audio recording is sampled, processed and replayed as a component of a new song.

It's a very punchy, very energetic fill or break that's just proven extremely versatile and great sounding, especially for drum and bass. It just sounds good! There are some other very famous breaks too, the Funky Drummer for example.

The words "I" "have" "a" "dream" take less than six seconds to say, so surely that information content has been hit upon by others in the past... As someone else has posted, there's a great documentary about the whole sampling/resampling scene that explains a bit about the attractions of this particular sonic segment : Suffice to say, there's a lot more to it than just a 1-2-3-4 pattern.

It is kind of absurd. Music is intrinsically about reuse, recycling, and reinvention [1]. Sampling is really just a continuation of that.

[1] Axis of Awesome, The Four Chord Song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

it's not just about the notes that are being played, but also the specific sound of that recording. AFAIK no one has been able to reproduce that exact sound , with the exact timing. That beat launched an entire kind of music (90's UK hardcore techno, then jungle/drum'n'bass)

Recordings are copyrighted.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that the Winstons own the pattern, just that they deserve more compensation for this particular rendering of it.

(I'm not a lawyer... this is not legal advice... etc)

But I think he probably could try it if he wanted to. There are a number of "sample trolls" using technology that finds samples in old songs: http://www.project-disco.org/intellectual-property/040914-wh...

The statute of limitations for copyright infringement usually starts when the infringement is discovered: http://law.freeadvice.com/intellectual_property/copyright_la...

I imagine the difficulty lies in the fact that it has simply been sampled so frequently and over such a long period of time that the case would not be easy to win and incredibly expensive to prosecute.

It constitutes copyright infringement, but of the copyright to the recording, not the "composition". AFAIK the band doesn't own the recording.

I think he could, definitely. Some artists have been sued for way less. I'm pretty sure this stuff was sampled and used by more than 10 000 different artists, in the drum'n'bass scene it's obvious.