This post focuses on the practice of sampling and its legal ramifications.
Sampling has, for years, been a routine practice in the music industry. Sampling is taking a part of an already recorded musical composition and repurposing it in a new composition. It used to be that people would simply sample freely, release the material, and pay up if they got caught. But, there were a good number of high profile court cases in the early 90s that showed that this wasn’t a very legally sound practice. The whole process of sampling is complex because the owners of the composition (the publisher or the artist) and the owners of the masters (probably the label or the artist) don’t have to let you use the material at all. This means that they can essentially ask whatever they want from you if you a) approach them with an offer or b) get caught after releasing a sampled track.
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