De La Soul. Public Enemy. The Beastie Boys. These giants of hip hop have all been sued over sampling, a heavily debated concept that continues to plague the music industry. Copyright Criminals, a documentary film by Kembrew McLeod and Benjamin Franzen, features the legal wranglings of these hip hop heavyweights while exploring the history of sampling in music, and the conflicts it creates between copyright law and artistic expression.
Through over fifty interviews with music industry folk, including artists, lawyers, scholars, business executives, and musicians, the film adeptly illustrates why the music industry is in such a state of disarray over the topic. The burning question? How do we put a price on sound, and where do we draw the line between what requires copyright protection and what falls under fair use?
In the hip hop world, this debate has plagued the genre since day one. A musical style based in many ways on integrating samples of other people’s music and sounds, hip hop unintentionally paved the way for the current hysteria of copyright infringement cases, as it opened up the door to the question of compensation for artistry and licensing sound in ways the original music laws never intended.
What Is Sampling?
Sampling, in the music world, is literally taking bits of sound from one source and incorporating them into another. Those bits can be any bit of sound - a vocal line, a drum beat, a full string orchestral arrangement. Along the way, sometimes the original source is manipulated to fit the new project's sound, perhaps distorted or played in reverse.
Sometimes the original snippet is manipulated so much, in fact, that it's difficult to decipher what it used to sound like and where it came from. And sometimes the sample is so short (like a single drum hit), it's difficult to ascertain what its original source was. As a result, sampling causes a slew of issues with regards to copyright infringement, as no one seems to agree on what should be copywritten.
Why The Debate?
Unlike the other industries in the United States, there is no hard and fast patent law for music. Instead, much like the Italian citystates in the 1930s, the music industry is plagued by myriad teeny laws that cover a small portion of certain things, but there are no overarching statutes to protect the artist community on the whole, at least not any that aren’t subject to debate and potentially bent.
Sure, an artist can copyright their music with the copyright office, but if someone wants to use a line from someone else’s chorus, they have to jump through a hundred hoops and pay huge fees to do so. However, if that same person simply hired a drummer to play the exact same part as is in the chorus they want to use, they wouldn’t have to go through the same channels or pay nearly as much. That makes sense how?
What Does Copyright Criminals Say About This?
Copyright Criminals posits that the issue with musical copyright is the distinction between what deserves financial compensation and what doesn’t. When it comes to the music industry, that means dealing with royalties, specifically synchronization fees, mechanical fees, and performance royalty fees.
The film focuses quite a bit on drummer Clyde Stubblefield, whose musical performance in James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” is widely considered the most heavily sampled and replicated beat in the hip hop world. Stubblefield does not get any compensation for this. He doesn’t even get credit. Through interviews in the film, the audience sees that though hip hop artists have acknowledged Stubblefield’s unique drum beat as one of the foundations for their genre, they haven’t gone so far as to legally credit or compensate him for using his work in their own.
Why? It all comes back to the debate over what is considered fair use, what should be compensated, and how. Some people don’t see sampling as taking from others. Some do. And, as is clear by the opposing opinions featured in the film, neither side will give an inch.
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