It’d be more like a legal toss up between the Roland employee and sound engineers who played and recorded the hits vs the corporation, rather than inanimate objects (the hats and ride, i.e their manufacturer), receiving royalties. How far could lawfare go?
Immesureable? - maybe no longer with AI. If retrospective, Clyde Stubblefield’s descendants would be very comfy, and a lot of musicians taken to the cleaners.
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Fascinating article.
I was reading a book on Catullus last night and came across this quote (I don’t speak French so I had to use GTranslate):
Aucune originalité littéraire, si puissante qu’elle soit, n’est sans emprunter des éléments à ce qui la précède.
“No literary originality, however powerful, is without borrowing elements from what precedes it.”
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People forget that music is a cultural language and not just a commodity for making money. Copyrighting a musical structure is as outrageous as copyrighting a linguistic one.
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She almost got there 25 years before anyone else.
Delia is the patron saint of electronic music.
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Not an apt analogy really, literature is subject to copyright too isn’t it?
I think that some kind of sensible and fair system should be in place.
linguistics are not limited to literature, but as it relates to language.
It is an apt analogy when the context is culture. Think of it this way… A language used by a group of people for thousands of years would not be subject to copyright. Even further, a common language use in many regions, with respective dialects used for 100s of years, by thousands of people would also not be subject to copyright.
Remembering that the subject of thread is not about sampling.
It does relate to culture and it relates to rhythms that have been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years in many different regions and have roots in various modern cultures. They weren’t created newly as suggested by the article. The author clearly does not know reggaeton by all the omissions of reggaeton music artists.
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It sounds analogous to trying to copyright a metre in poetry. Even if you somehow came up with a fantastic new structure, you’d still only have copyright over the words. I suppose you could argue for a trademark if you had something truly unique and inseparable from your “brand”, similar to trademarking a colour or a shape (like Toblerone), but I’d say it’d be an uphill if not vertical struggle.
Limericks are a good thought experiment - I wonder if they could have been trademarked with a concerted effort. They have an identifiable structure with fixed rhythm and stresses, and I suppose they might even be argued to blur into melody, so perhaps they could have been subject to copyright. This is now my #2 time travel priority, right after I discover who really shot Lincoln.
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Really interesting topic. I find it quite amusing that the guy who made the Sleng Teng Riddim is arguing for the suing party. Okuda Hiroko might like to have a word 
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Fair enough, yes I was talking about sampling wrt to the analogy, my bad.
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Enju is referring to King Jammy, who’s quoted in the article as supporting the suit.
King Jammy is a musical hero of mine and a partial inspiration for my screen name, but I think he’s trying to have it both ways here.
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Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about, too.
Engineers and producers like Jammy and his contemporaries were able to make amazing, beautiful, innovative music (and their own reputations) thanks in no small part to JA having no real intellectual property laws when they did most of their work.
I can’t remember the exact quote, but I think the venerable Lee Scratch Perry talked about this when an interviewer asked him about reusing Wailers ridddims in his own productions. He basically said “whoever owns the tapes, owns the tapes.”
Which I think sounds both super fucked up and unfair but also allowed for the creation of what I sincerely believe to be some of the finest music ever produced.
You might say that it sipple out deh.
Or that it’s tricky to rock around.
It’s tricky, tricky, tricky.
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot now that Steamboat Willie is about to become public domain in the US, despite Disney fighting tooth and nail to keep their mouse in-house.
I love so much of the work Disney has done over the last, oh, century or so. But it feels so wrong for a company that made its name largely on retelling public-domain stories to fight so hard to keep anyone else from being able to work with the foundational stuff of culture, the way they themselves do all the time, since day one.
Free the mouse!
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