Yes but aren't artists now compensated for their art being used in sampling? At least when it makes a profit?
I haven't heard of anyone being compensated for their works making profit for OpenAI
I haven't heard of anyone being compensated for their works making profit for OpenAI
When say Madonna sampled the Beegees, I'm sure it was a large ordeal.
But for low profit or no profit work (independent stuff), the answer is nobody cares.
Bob James, one of the most sampled artists in history, take it in stride. He's happy that so many people are listening to his stuff. The Winston's (the famous amen break) were also happy the track got such wide acceptance.
Killing Joke, on the other hand, felt "Come as you are" was a rip off of "Eighties" and only dropped it upon the death of Kurt Cobain.
Or take Toni Basil's Mickey, which is actually a cover song of Racey's Kitty. Toni Basil has gone to court to secure pretty exclusive rights to the song. Racey does not get any of Toni's cash.
So it varies and it's messy.
this is not a very interesting use case to consider because the AI outfits making the current news are definitely for-profit.
If they're selling just the models then it's a cleaner case, but lots of copyrighted sample discs had unlicensed samples or entire synth piano rolls, it was common.
The copyright system is a human institution that's layered on top. It can go a variety of directions.
Michael Jackson for instance, took a sample from the Synclaviar sampler disc, put it at the beginning of Beat It completely unmodified and now the copyright for all intents and purposes is owned by Jackson.
That's an act of generosity, not legal status
So it depends
Bob James gets paid. Like, have you ever listened to Bob James talk about people sampling his stuff. He's very clear his in favour of it it _if he gets paid_. Otherwise the lawyers get involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejFayH39y6M
"As long as it's creative, as long as it's liscened properly, I have actually become kind of a fan of it"
> The Winston's (the famous amen break) were also happy the track got such wide acceptance.
I wouldn't say that was the case:
> Neither he nor Coleman received royalties for the break, and Spencer was not aware of its use until 1996, when an executive contacted him asking for the master tape.[3] He was unable to take legal action, as the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years in the US.[1]
> Spencer condemned the sampling as plagiarism and said he "felt ripped off and raped".[2] He said in 2011: "[Coleman's] heart and soul went into that drum break. Now these guys copy and paste it and make millions."[3] However, in 2015, he said: "It's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm a black man in America and the fact that someone wants to use something I created – that's flattering."[2]
> Coleman died homeless and destitute in 2006.[2] Spencer said it was unlikely he was aware of the impact he had made on music. In 2015, a GoFundMe campaign set up for Spencer by the British DJs Martyn Webster and Steve Theobald raised £24,000 (US$37,000).[2] Spencer died in 2020.[9]
It's actually one of the greater travesties of modern culture, I think. The amen break is a fundamental part of today's musical culture, but its creators received no compensation and did not benefit from it. The one financial contribution that occurred was of no use to the break's creator -- as they were dead -- and its recipient died a few years later.
In any case, this is going to get much worse in the years to come. I'm very much in favour of AI being able to train on our societal output, but it's also extremely likely to worsen existing inequities. We're going to need to dramatically shift how society functions to accommodate this new reality, and it's not something you can solve with royalties or a training fee. When everyone can create, what will happen to the existing market of creators?
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)
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.
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...