If one were looking for reasons to be leery of Slate article "Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll," a good clue might be found in the casual background assertion: "George Clinton is otherwise known as the King of Interplanetary Funk and, along with the late Rick James, the world's most famous funk musician." No offense, Mr. Brown! None taken, we're sure.
But this is not the article's topic. It's a discussion of how "sample trolls," like "patent trolls" before them, hustle about acquiring rights to pieces of music for the express purpose of suing or settling with musicians (or their corporations) who have sampled these pieces, or hope to. The example in this case is Bridgeport music, which just turns out to be some guy named Armen Boladian, after an easy buck:
Since 2001, Bridgeport's shotgun approach has led to many dismissals and settlements, but also two major victories. First, in 2005, Bridgeport convinced Nashville's federal appellate court to buy into its copyright theory. In that case, Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, the defendants sampled a single chord from the George Clinton tune "Get Off Your Ass and Jam," changed the pitch, and looped the sound in the background. (The result is almost completely unrecognizable—you can listen to it here). The Sixth Circuit created a rule: that any sampling, no matter how minimal or undetectable, is a copyright infringement. Said the court in Bridgeport, "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."Righteous outrage etc etc. No argument here. But Tim Wu's version of the story proceeds from quite an odd assumption:
The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation.This is a troubled assertion on the face of it, since it assumes something that millions of hip-hop (or music) fans are far from certain of: that copyright is, as a general rule, a friend of musical innovation, insofar as (in the case of hip-hop) the original copyright control of sampling raised massive barriers-to-entry for hip-hop artists, corporatizing the genre and, by many accounts, bringing an end to the form's era of innovation.
Assumptions aside, there is a more pernicious (and more comedically absurd) error in this claim. It proposes that there is no logical connection between the abstraction of "copyright" and the concrete fact of Bridgeport. This is self-apparently false from the perspective of logic, and from the perspective of law. Indeed, the author eventually wends his way to this realization, realizing that people tend to take advantage of laws to make money, rather than using them as vague suggestions about honor. At which point he proposes this or that sort of legal patch. But even in this motion, he turns back as if magnetized toward his basic orientation: copyright is good as long as it isn't perverted. If it could just be made to serve individual artists and not corporate profit-takers — a few small changes, and this little problem will be behind us.
There must be a word for this. For this invocation to never think systemically, historically, at all costs. Surely there is some term for the belief, against all evidence, that laws legislating ownership of ideas, and right to profit, do not tend toward enriching the wealthy while increasingly disenfranchising the remainder? There must be some kind of concept for the ability not to have this thought, and thus to experience the legal system as independent of the people it serves, as being indeed fundamentally disconnected from its manifest outcomes? For assigning each increasingly generalized episode — S&L scandal, Enron, WorldCom — to the bad faith of bad individuals? To not knowing history as having a directionality in which the law participates? No, really, we can just fix it with a patch! We can extract the bad apples!
There's got to be some kind of name for this, like we have a name for phantom limbs and snow-blindness...
Posted by jane at November 18, 2006 09:11 AM | TrackBack