Re: "Copying"...what does that mean?
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.
Variola wrote... "OTOH, a parodist can use perfect copies if the context distinguishes the content." Well, you'd think. On the other hand, that "Bittersweet Symphony" dude didn't make a dime off that song because the Rolling Stones are sampled in there somwhere. The "Gray Album" guy of course neve made a dime because he sample the White Album and Kill-Mo-Dee's Black Album (or whatever), which no one would ever confuse with the originals. So apparently a sample is a copy. Now arguably, a "sample" is only a "sample" if it can be recognized (or so I'm told), but this means that "copying" is no longer a layer 1 through 4 phenomenon. However, the demise of Kazaa, et al proves that's not true either. A copy is a copy if someone with money can buy the MwGs. Or at least that's what it looks like, given the above. Which is not to say I'm so anti-statist that I don't believe in the very concept of a "copyright". For me, however, at best it's a social convention that we "outsource" the use of force to enforce, so that it will be possible for full-time recording artists to exist. I can live with that: Society is a devil's bargain. BUT, if enforcement boils down to the local official's definition of "copyright", then it's time to fire up the CD burner. -TD
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Major Variola (ret) -
Tyler Durden