There have been successful lawsuits here concerning the "sound alike" nature of a singer's voice, the most notable of them coming from Bette Midler's camp. She won! The precedent set here is, again, intent. That intention is to willfully trick the public into thinking they're listening to the real Bette Midler, or whoever they're trying to sound like. Knowing the industry the way I do, I'm sure there were scads of forensic evidence in the Midler case. Stupid advertising agencies!! Again, laziness rears its ugly head.
I have never studied any law and I absolutely hate myself for knowing the little that I do.
fritz
-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Dickson <mike.dickson@gmail.com>
To: newmellotrongroup <newmellotrongroup@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sun, Feb 27, 2011 7:24 am
Subject: Re: [newmellotrongroup] Re: samples and copyright
On 27/02/2011 01:59, John Hammaren wrote:
I guess this topic gets my ire up, since although I have the utmost respect for the work and creations of others, the current state of intellectual property law is a freaking mess IMHO.
As ever, the law is driven by those who can afford to drive it.
I’m not a lawyer, but it hardly takes one to realize this.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I do have a Masters in Law and part of that took in the subject of copyright, designs and patents.
Throw in the current software patent nonsense and we have a bigger mess.
Interesting side note: you cannot patent software. It's specifically excluded from patent. You can copyright it, but since ideas cannot be copyrighted then it means algorithms cannot be copyrighted either. If you had the means you could make a functional close of (say) Microsoft Windows and Bill Gates could not touch you for it. Why? The source code would be different. The code is your work of 'art' and hence falls into the territory of copyright, not patent. Unless you have copied large parts of it verbatim then you will be okay.
Pretty soon we will be able to copyright the timbre of our God given voices the way things are going.
You can. One firm (in 1987) tried to copyright a single letter which was associated with their name. IBM tried the same thing with their abbreviated name and also failed. (Narrowly) This veers into the territory of trade marks, where a visual identifier is associated with name or product. This says 'IBM' whereas the same thing in copperplate script does not. If a visual aid works then why not an audio one? If someone has a very distinctive voice (I'm thinking in terms of scale like Diamanda Galas here) then why not? I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I am saying that it's evidently possible.
My favourite ever sampling story has to be the one about David Bowie's track 'Lets Dance'. It was very popular back in the day and that was oput down to the drum timbres. The kick drum and snare from the opening sequence were sampled to shreds and were featured on dozens of other contemporary tunes, thanks to the Fairlight CMI. Bowie;s production team made litigious noises, but it all came to nothing.
Why? Because both were sampled from 'Moby Dick'.
--
Mike Dickson, Edinburgh
Free Music Project: http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/
Or http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+Dickson
Or http://soundcloud.com/mikedickson
Or http://www.planetmellotron.com/revd4.htm#mikedickson
Or http://www.myspace.com/mellotronworksMessage
Re: [newmellotrongroup] Re: samples and copyright
2011-02-27 by fdoddy@aol.com