Sampling -- there needs to be some wiggle-room

I was really interested in the movie we watched on Friday, regarding sampling music and its struggles with copyright holders. 

Personally I was especially interested in the idea of seeing sampled music as a tool from a toolbox. After all, you wouldn't sue a man who builds a shed for using a hammer to help him build it. Can the same mentality be applied to music?

It’s a different viewpoint of how I would have previously considered sampling music, but I think there’s a point to it – sampling a song is, in fact, very different than from posting a song as your own, or even doing a cover of it. You are not taking the composition as a whole, but using it to create an entirely different composition, and using other music as a sort of instrument or tool. 

Now I do agree that sample artists and/or songs should always be credited. But going back to my previous post about needing to leave musicians room for creativity; I’m not even sure how sampling is really even a bad thing? It’s not like the listener is getting the whole song, so you aren’t losing revenue. But if your work is credited, and the listener says “hey that one sample was really cool,” you might actually gain a few new listeners. I especially liked the idea of new musicians bringing back older music that might have lost its popularity, or exposing music to a different audience that it might not have considered before. 

Which is such a shame that people are trying to make the copyright laws stricter -- instead of crediting artists, some of the sampling artists we watched admitted that they were purposely trying to warp their samples so much that even the copyright holders wouldn't be able to recognize it. Instead of encouraging collaboration, we are only encouraging sneakiness. 

There’s another point to be considered when we think about sampling—accidents are bound to happen. By which I mean a musician is inevitably going to come up with a series of beats, a music phrase, or something of the kind that sounds EXACTLY LIKE that one bit in that other song. I remember my vocal coaching teacher telling me how she felt there was an Elvis song that had a few measures that sounded exactly like another song that was nothing like the Elvis song, I think it was something like an Italian aria that dated back hundreds of years ago. She said she was pretty much positive he didn’t intentionally copy it, the point she was trying to make is pretty much “nothing is original.” What happens when somebody sues another musician because they came up with a few beats that sound like your song, a song that the "stealing" musician may have never heard before, or never heard that often? That brings up the question of how much can you copyright? Can you copyright a rhythm? A musical phrase?  A specific two notes?

There could easily be a point where our concerns over sampling and taking credit for what is ours could throw copyright into a point of ridiculousness -- where we tried to hold on to things that anyone could easily, unintentionally, recreate. Since in some ways, copyright is getting stricter, rather than more open as the digital age blooms, we have to keep in mind that there are limitations to originality, and we have to allow some leeway.