Development of the Creative Commons Sampling license (or license option)

[Don Joyce <dj AT webbnet.com>]

Title: Re: [cc-sampling] of interest - eminem law suit

I'm getting off topic - sort of - but

Ha, a wonderful little example, just so typical, of how copyright presents music "owners" (notice she didn't make the music she's suing over) with both the opportunistic temptation to get rich by creating nothing, and the ability to inhibit or restrain the production of new music they may not like.

All who collage music should seriously worry about ever becoming rich or successful at it (Heaven forbid!) because they will become the economically suitable targets of money-for-nothing sampling suits under copyright laws that validate and support the pre-eminence of the source owner's personal greed.

Eminem should have acknowledged the source on the work, but we can now clearly see why that remains a bad idea for wealthy collagists like Eminem under current copyright law.

He could have asked her first, but knowing about this, how much do you suppose she would have wanted to let him use it? If she knew his work, would she have let him use her husband's work for any price?

The crime is, she could win.

The odds are much better than the lottery.

All copyrights should end upon their entrance into a collage.

 "Be gone, you have no powers here."

   (sample from The Wizard Of Oz.)

Until copyright law gets around to this realization, any collage that generates an income will always remain creatively stymied by the egos and opportunism of its sources and subjects.

And face it, there is no privacy that art favors, and certainly not concerning other art works that have already been enthusiastically thrust out into the public market place for mass consideration.

Trying to maintain rights of private property in such public exposures is self-contradictory (a mental disfunction thought to be a basis for schizophrenia, incidently) and ridiculously out of whack with human reality.

The only private art is art that nobody but the artist knows about. 

DJ

> here's a lawsuit over
> "interpolation"
>
>
> http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_820458.html
>
> Woman, 70, suing Eminem and Dre for 'millions'
>
> A 70-year-old Los Angeles woman is suing Eminem and Dr Dre for
> unlawfully
> sampling music by her late husband on The Slim Shady LP.
>
> Harlene Stein says one track, Guilty Conscience, features snippets
> from a
> piece called Pigs Go Home that her husband Ronald wrote for the score
> of the
> 1970 film Getting Straight.
>
> She filed a lawsuit last month in the US District Court complaining
> that
> Eminem and Dre used her late husband's music to compose the
> background
> instrumental for the rap song.
>
> Mrs Stein's complaint also names Eminem's music publishing companies
> and
> Interscope Records as co-defendants, reports Billboard.
>
> The liner notes for The Slim Shady LP state that Guilty Conscience
> features
> an "interpolation" of Go Home Pigs but Stein is never
> credited as the song's
> composer, nor was his wife ever paid royalties.
>
> The suit does not specify damages, which Stein's attorneys are
> calculating,
> but they could amount to well more than £2 million.
>
> Mrs Stein is asking for 5% of the retail list price of 90% of the
> 4.6
> million copies of The Slim Shady LP sold in America and 2.5% of the
> retail
> price of 90% of the albums sold abroad.
>
> In addition, she wants substantial payments from sheet-music sales
> and
> publishing royalties, as well as punitive damages.
>
> Finally, Mrs Stein asks that Interscope not distribute records with
> the
> sample of Pigs Go Home and that all existing copies be pulled from
> shelves.
>
>
> Story filed: 12:07 Thursday 18th September 2003
>
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