The ruling says artists must pay for not only large samples of another artist's work, but also snippets -- smaller notes, chords and beats that are not the artist's original composition -- which had previously been legal, according to The Associated Press
"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."
Thank God they're protecting valuable intellectual property from lawless piracy, otherwise capitalism as we know it would collapse and we'd enter a new dark age.
Discharge, here we come!
This is, of course, unpolicable - if an artist uses a sample so highly modified as to be unrecognisable, how in all reality is anyone going to know? Are musicians going to be required to keep work records detailing the precice construction of every song?
What's going to happen next? Fender charging you a licence fee for each note you play on one of their guitars?
What if I'm using some "found sounds" I recorded on the street and someone's Nokia is ringing way off in the distant background?
What if I sample a "beat" from a recording, and that "beat" is simply the kick-drum sound from a Roland 808? Do I owe money to the artist I sampled, or to Roland?
Of course, Disney is finding that intellectual property can cut both ways in South Africa. Of course, they're upset, intellectual property is about what _they_ own not what they might have stolen off somebody else.
This ruling is pretty screwy. How the hell do you claim ownership over a few bars of music? Surely every possible short musical notes has cropped up at sometime in something else. If I sampled a few beats on a track, will there be dozens of artists and labels who can identify the same beats somewhere in their discographies who should sue me? And shouldn't they then start suing each other?
Well we can now claim this as evidence that God doesn't exist. Otherwise, the various religions would be now taking out actions for using God's creations for commercial purposes.
God can't claim copyright.
This is the reason why in less than twenty years some state governor will try to declare independence and then the USA will colapse like the USSR did, when China does to them - economically and culturally - what they did to the Soviets.
I honestly can't wait. These people are no longer even defending capitalism as any economist can tell you (China is), they are just defending State-controlled (in a sense the RIAA is State) Stalinism.