My reflection of Copyright Criminals

After watching Copyright Criminals there are many different ideas and topics discussed that I wanted to bring to light. They begin the movie by defining the word “sample”. To sample is to use a segment of another’s musical recording as part of one’s own recording. Sampling is a very beneficial process to make new music while channeling music from the past. Sampling allows the listener to travel back to a specific time or action and evoke feeling or thought that enhances the song or remix being listened to. A spectrum of sampling exists. On one side, you can be sampling music from a very famous song by the Beatles but on the other hand you can take an unknown R&B song from the void and bring it back to life.

Even though sampling is a creative process in the eyes of some it is a crime in the eyes of others. The most famous case in which sampling is just wrong and complete copyright is MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” released in 1990 from Rick James “Super Freak” released in 1981. To prevent this from happening laws are in place and music creators must pay for the music they borrow. The way that artists pay for instruments, remixers need to pay for the music they sample. There are instances where remixers have to pay for the extremely short samples such as James Brown singing “uhuh”. Whenever artists did not pay to use samples or get permission, they got in a lot of trouble. This happened many times because going through and clearing samples from not only the artist but everyone else that was involved in making that sound can be very time consuming as well as financially demanding. The courts were not listening to young black artists about how their sampling techniques are a unique process within themselves and uncleared sampling was not tolerated.

Even though sampling was a creative process there was too much money to be made to allow it to happen without rules. Example of creative sampling comes from Music groups like public enemy and Paris who would sample speeches from Malcom X and black panther and reanimated them. Despite their creative process, they had to take additional actions to make sure that they did not get sued for copyright. Music producers have shifted from sampling whatever sounds they liked into having to be cautious and think about how much clearing samples would cost. The end result in their music is significantly different. Another way to avoid being pursued by copyright laws some artist would make their samples unidentifiable. There would be sounds in their music that seem familiar but no one would be able to trace it back to the original.

Many times the money made from copyright doesn’t go to the people with the most creative work. The money is not the important thing to the actual creators, they just want the respect and for people to know that they were sampled. I want to end the topic with a quote that ties many of the ideas that John Berger had discussed in Ways of Seeing to the world of sampling. “Perhaps it is easier to take a piece of music than it is to learn how to play the guitar just like how it is probably easier to snap a picture with a camera than it is to actually paint a picture, but what the photographer is to the painter the modern producer, DJ, and computer musician is to the instrumentalist.”