Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod,Peter DiCola,Jenny Toomey,Kristin Thomson

How did the Depression-era folk-song collector Alan Lomax turn out with a songwriting credits on Jay-Z’s tune “Takeover”? Why doesn’t Clyde Stubblefield, the first drummer on James Brown recordings from the past due Nineteen Sixties resembling “Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat,” receives a commission for different musicians’ common use of the beats he played on these songs? The track industry’s method of electronic sampling—the act of incorporating snippets of latest recordings into new ones—holds the solutions. Exploring the complexities and contradictions in how samples are approved, Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola interviewed greater than a hundred musicians, managers, legal professionals, pros, reporters, and students. in keeping with these interviews, Creative License places electronic sampling into old, cultural, and criminal context. It describes hip-hop in the course of its sample-heavy golden age within the Nineteen Eighties and early Nineties, the proceedings that formed U.S. copyright legislation on sampling, and the labyrinthine licensing technique that musicians needs to now navigate. The authors argue that the present procedure for licensing samples is inefficient and bounds creativity. for example, via estimating the present-day licensing charges for the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (1989) and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (1990), albums from hip-hop’s golden age, the authors express that neither album may be published commercially at the present time. gazing that an analogous dynamics that create difficulties for remixers now reverberate all through all tradition industries, the authors finish through reading principles for reform.

Interviewees include David Byrne, Cee Lo eco-friendly, George Clinton, De los angeles Soul, DJ most excellent, DJ Qbert, Eclectic strategy, El-P, woman speak, Matmos, combine grasp Mike, Negativland, Public Enemy, RZA, Clyde Stubblefield, T.S. Monk.