Illegal music: the war on sampling.

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Citings - Brief Article

THIS ARTICLE IS plagiarized. Every word in it has been brazenly "sampled" from a book, the dictionary, and "remixed" into a news story.

That's a pretty silly way to define plagiarism, but it's not far from the logic of a September decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. In Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the court held that the rap group NWA committed copyright infringement when it used a looped three-note, 1.5-second riff from the Funkadelic track "Get off Your Ass and Jam" for its song "100 Miles and Runnin"

The practice of crafting new musical works from bits and pieces of older songs has a long history, from the groundbreaking aural decoupage of comedian Dickie Goodman's 1956 single "The Flying Saucer" to Vanilla Ice's somewhat less inspired lift from David Bowie's "Under Pressure" for his 1990 hit "Ice...