At 12:46 PM 11/22/05 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote:
As I said before, if a "sample" is copying, how small a sample are we talking about? Look-->0101 I sampled Britney and that's what I got. I'm therefore copying and could go to jail. I probably won't go to jail, though, unless I eat into someone's profits or piss off individuals in the government.
"Five" is too short to be copyrightable. A longer segment would be. I once asked, can Intel's "ding dong dong-dong-dong" be copyrighted? The answer is essentially, to be a glib information theoriest, if the chances of picking that sequence are sufficiently small. Of course, given that its humanly perceptable, shifting the whole sequence by a large number of Hz is also irrelevant, since humans (except for pitch-perfect folks) will perceive it as the same. OTOH, a parodist can use perfect copies if the context distinguishes the content.