546 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
This “golden age” of sampling ended with a December 1991 court decision
in favor of a music publisher that sued a rapper for unauthorized use of a 1970s
soft rock song. Some legal historians now view this case as a lost opportunity to
establish sampling as within the bounds of fair use. Instead, the rapper’s record
label, Warner Brothers, pursued a weak defense strategy and lost resound-
ingly, setting a legal precedent that made unauthorized sampling too risky. And
because publishers tended to set exorbitant licensing fees, authorized sampling
became prohibitively expensive in many instances. Creators of the sampled
songs reacted in various ways, from outrage at what they saw as theft to delight
at what they saw as an act of homage; many older artists were happy to receive
partial songwriting credit and a share of royalties, whatever they thought of the
new song’s quality.
Since 1992, then, hip-hop artists have taken any of a number of paths in the
creation of hip-hop beats. First, the wealthiest hip-hop artists simply pay the high
fees for authorized samples. Second, some choose samples from obscure artists
whose songs are less expensive to clear. Third, some producers, such as Dr. Dre,
prefer to use studio musicians to recreate the sound of earlier songs, much as in
the fi rst rap records; Dre argues that he does this as much for aesthetic reasons as
for legal ones. Fourth, a handful of producers build their beats “from the ground
up,” using no sampling or borrowing of any kind. Finally, many artists choose to
fl out the law, digitally altering unauthorized samples to make them unrecogniz-
able to the copyright holders. In short, current standards of copyright protection
have encouraged a subversive, “outlaw” approach to the creation of hip-hop.THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION II: THE DOWNLOADING WARS
Two pieces of legislation in 1998 made copy right protection even more stringent.
The Sonny Bono Act—named after a recently deceased congressman who had
been a folk-rock singing star in the 1960s—extended copyright protection beyond
the limits of the 1976 law. Under the new act, anything created after 1923 that was
still copyright protected in 1998 will remain so until at least 2019; that includes
almost everything by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and other long-dead song-
writers. The second law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), gives
copyright holders veto power over all uses of their work, even those that con-
stitute fair use. It authorizes the use of digital rights management (DRM) tools
to restrict how consumers use electronic media such as sound recordings—for
example, the content scramble system that makes it diffi cult to rip a DVD to a
computer hard drive.
The DCMA was in part a response to new digital technology that in the 1990s
was making electronic media easier to disseminate. One of these, the MP3,
compressed audio fi les to much more manageable sizes that took less computer
memory to store and, more importantly, could more easily travel across the
Internet. Music fans began to share recorded music online, and by the end of
the decade, 17 million MP3s were being downloaded onto personal computers
every day. Because searching for MP3s was slow and laborious, Shawn Fanning,
an eighteen-year-old student at Northeastern University in Boston, developed a
utility that made it easier for users to locate MP3s and download them directly
from other users’ computers—a peer-to-peer (p2p) fi le-sharing network. W hen
his utility, Napster, went online in 1999, it quickly developed a devoted following,
and in a short time it had some 25 million users and indexed 80 million songs.sampling practicesthe Sonny Bono Actthe DCMAthe MP3p2p networks172028_22_531-558_r3_sd.indd 546 23/01/13 11:20 AM