legal issues

French dance gurus Justice offered a little lawyer-bait in an interview with MTV, revealing that they didn’t bother to clear many of the samples they used on their debut album, Cross. 

Speaking to MTV, Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay confirmed what many fans have suspected for a while when they said: “we sample really small bits of things that nobody can recognise”.

“If you listen to Genesis, the first track, there are samples of Slipknot, Queen and 50 Cent, but they are such short samples no one can recognise them. The ones from Slipknot, for example, are just tiny bits of the voice.”

Justice did make sure that the obviously lifted material was legit. ”On the album, we used three big samples that we had to clear,” they confirmed.

It’s safe to assume that they didn’t clear their statements with their lawyer, either.

There’s a great article by Suzanne Vega today at the New York Times. 

In it, Vega talks about her song Tom’s Diner getting remixed, illegally, by DNA:

We were backstage at the Arsenio Hall show when my manager told me that some boys calling themselves DNA, in England — Bath, to be specific — had taken “Tom’s Diner” and put a dance track to it. They had “re-mixed” it. (I don’t remember what we called that type of music back then — house? rap? hip-hop? It wasn’t “disco” or “thrash-metal.”) My manager, Ron Fierstein, told me that A&M and Polygram were considering taking legal action against them for copyright violation.

I thought, well, let me listen to it — and immediately liked it. It made me laugh. It wasn’t a parody, which is what I was afraid of. The song is the same, my voice is still my voice, the story still the story, even though they left out the very end (they told me later they thought it sounded weird, musically, to keep the ending).

Instead of sending the boys to jail, my manager worked out a deal with them for a flat fee. A&M Records paid the fee, and we retained all rights.

I made the decision to call the remix “Tom’s Diner, by DNA featuring Suzanne Vega” because I didn’t know if the audience would accept the new sound, and I wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t my production. To my surprise, I didn’t have to worry about that as it was accepted everywhere. DNA were surprised to find themselves suddenly classified as an “act,” since they did mostly production.

I had imagined that a few dance clubs would play it, and that would be the end of it. But it was played on radio right away, including the R&B stations, a new experience for me. I even received a plaque congratulating me for having one of the most played R&B songs of 1990. R&B! How cool.

Vega goes on to talk about all the other remixes of Tom’s Diner that this led to, and how Tom’s Diner was used by the creators of the MP3 format to test their compression algorithms. 

It’s a great article, touching on digital media, copyright and the benefits of working with people that want to remix your work. 

Link

Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that releases licenses for sharing music and other creations freely over the Internet, is retiring one of its sampling licenses, citing lack of use.

Here’s CC’s Lawrence Lessig’s explanation of the decision to retire the license:

Until today, we have offered three versions of the Sampling license. Two of those versions permit noncommercial sharing of the licensed work (SamplingPlus, and Noncommercial SamplingPlus). One (the Sampling License) only permits the remix of the licensed work, not the freedom to share it. There is a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially.

Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least this minimal freedom — at least not without substantial public discussion. We are grateful for the feedback, and for the understanding of those who helped us craft the sampling licenses, both of which got us here.

This change does not affect any existing licensed work. The links to these licenses, and every Creative Commons license, will always remain valid. The only change we’re making today is that we will no longer offer these licenses on our licensing page.

CC’s Sampling Licenses are an interesting option for musicians that want to encourage sampling and reworking of their music. People can take and transform pieces of your work for any purpose other than advertising, which is prohibited. Copying and distribution of the entire work is also prohibited.

Cisco and Apple today announced that they have resolved their dispute involving the “iPhone” trademark.Under the agreement, both companies are free to use the “iPhone” trademark on their products throughout the world. Both companies acknowledge the trademark ownership rights that have been granted, and each side will dismiss any pending actions regarding the trademark.

In addition, Cisco and Apple will explore opportunities for interoperability in the areas of security, and consumer and enterprise communications. Other terms of the agreement are confidential.

Apple has patented (#7,176,374) a music synthesizer and a method of generating a synthesizer output with a constant beat.

In a nutshell, the patent covers a design that lets two oscillators be synced with a Hz difference that is constant across the range of the keyboard. If you tune (detune) the oscillators to be 6 Hz apart in pitch, the design would keep the oscillators 6 Hz appart no matter what pitches you play.
Abstract: 

Prior art synthesizers often select a small interval d to detune. For example, if the nominal oscillator frequency was 1000 Hz, then applying a detune parameter of 10 cent would result in a detuned oscillator frequency of 1006 Hz. However, at the next octave, the nominal frequency would be 2000 Hz with the detuned oscillator frequency of 2012 Hz. Accordingly, a detuned oscillator has a frequency deviation which is proportional to its nominal frequency. Hence, when mixing detuned oscillators, the resulting signal has a beat frequency which varies with the pitch and doubles with each octave.

An aim of the present invention is to provide a music synthesizer whereby sounds are generated with a constant optimum beat across a large range of tones.The present invention relates to a music synthesizer comprising a first and second oscillator and a signal generator which applies a constant beat parameter to a pitch signal to derive the input for said second oscillator, thereby enabling a synthesizer output to be generated at a substantially constant beat.