WHAT THE FUCK!!!

THE MILLENIUM Copyright act may have claimed an entire genre of music following a ruling from an appeal court which has ruled that sampling is piracy

Until yesterday an artist only had to pay for samples that were fairly large.

However, thanks to the new ruling musicians will have to pay out for snippets — smaller notes, chords and beats that are not the artist's original composition, it seems

Lower courts had already ruled that artists must pay when they sample another artists' work. But it has been legal to use musical snippets - a note here, a chord there - as long as it wasn't identifiable.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati gets rid of that distinction. The court said federal laws aimed at stopping piracy of recordings applies to digital sampling.

"If you cannot pirate the whole sound recording, can you 'lift' or 'sample' something less than the whole? Our answer to that question is in the negative," the court said.

"Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

``It's a nuisance and a shame,'' Peter Alhadeff, a professor at the Berklee School of Music, said of the ruling. ``I'm wondering if it hinders creativity more than it helps it, as copyright law is supposed to do.''

The case is one of 800 lawsuits filed by Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records in 2001

Bridgeport and Westbound own the rights to many recordings, including those of George Clinton and the influential groups Funkadelic and Parliament. A two second sample of a Funkadelic record in NWA's "100 Miles and Runnin" is at the heart of the ruling made by the judges Tuesday.

Clinton himself was not opposed to sampling. He produced two albums, Sample Some of Dis and Sample Some of Dat, which allowed artists to use Clinton’s music without legal scrutiny.

"Well, first of all, I suspect that the industry again is trying to do to rap what they tried to do to funk, and that's kill it because it's got to much information, and spreading of information,” Clinton told the Houston Press in 1992. “So what we've done to keep them from all this stupidity, like trying to sue, or saying that I'm suing people, is to put out a record called "Sample Some of Disc and Sample Some of Dat" - just samples from alot of the old songs, because I have some of the demos of those songs, which is not what the record company owns, so I can license those to be sampled. We have a pay schedule that's really easy to deal with - if they sell records, they pay, if they don't they can try again. We got to make sure that rap survives, because it's our only means of communication that gets past the gatekeepers.”

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