A 25-Year-Fight over a 2-Second Sample(www.plagiarismtoday.com)
26 pointsby speckx5 days ago3 comments
  • ButlerianJihad3 days ago
    For comparison:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break (used in thousands of tracks; zero royalties)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sampled_drum_breaks

  • svantana3 days ago
    It's ironic that the sample is blended with two other well known drum loops that most likely were not cleared either. From what I understand, drum samples are rarely cleared because they don't contain "music" in the traditional sense of music = melody + lyrics.
    • glenngillen3 days ago
      I can’t remember who they were talking about now, but I was listening to a podcast recently that had Questlove (drummer from The Roots) and he was retelling about the first time he met someone. As part of the intro he said something like “of course I know you, you sampled me on <track>” and then he laughed at their shock because they absolutely had not cleared the sample and he was just “hey, it’s alright. We’re cool”.

      But it was wild to me to think that in the middle of a track there’s like a 2-3 sec bit of percussion and he can (correctly!) go “hey, that’s me!”. It wasn’t some looping thing throughout the song. Just a single sample. And he knew it was him playing it!

      • svantana2 days ago
        Yup, he had a few isolated drum hits on D'Angelo's Voodoo album that were sampled by absolutely everybody for a few years.
      • slim3 days ago
        because he probably sampled it himself from another source and spent hours researching the original source and similar breaks then spent hours piling layers of sound and effects on these 2s. So he knows exactly which one is theirs
        • eszed3 days ago
          I think you missed the directionality of the anecdote. After that whole process, the drummer still recognized his work on the sample within the song.
  • bilekas3 days ago
    European bureaucracy is famously slow and the red tape can be extremely overwhelming and really hinders innovation at times, but this is another level. I wonder after so many years of this seemingly trivial 2 seconds, how interested both sides actually cared or if it was more of a novelty / precedent thing.