What Is Project In The Mix?

What Can This Project Investigate?

One of the main issues in intellectual property and copyright law is fair use, the permission to freely use copyright protected materials in certain contexts. It's an inordinately complex issue, but the basic concept has to do with the idea that you can use a portion of something if your use of it does not cost the copyright holder in value- for example, if you quote a line of dialogue from an author in a book, it is unlikely that that quote will fulfill readers' need to read the whole text, which to do so they would need to purchase the whole text. However, if you 'quoted' an entire relevant chapter, that would possibly not be fair use, as perhaps a reader will be able to fully fulfill his needs from your quote, rather than purchasing the text.

Sampling has long been debated as a possible application of fair use, although the current legal rulings generally disagree, while still remaining indefinite. As it is, samples must be 'cleared' by the copyright holder, which generally means paying a lot of royalties to a label and artist, even for a relatively minor sample. The penalties for not clearing a sample can be dire, such as the infamous Bittersweet Symphony case. A full investigation into the relationships between sampling and sampled songs, over issues of popularity, sales, other sampling songs of the same sampled song, and others could possibly shed some light on the effects of sampling.

Issues to be addressed:

• • Uncleared Samples- Many current and past songs, especially early hip hop songs, have uncleared samples, which were never paid or announced in their release. As such, finding these samples is very difficult. Luckily, there are several collaborative efforts of fans to create databases of samples and sampling songs, such as the-breaks.com, where this information, although spotty, can be found.

  • Other Song Info- These databases generally only contain the basics about the sampled/sampling songs, and for an in-depth investigation, more information needs to be found. As such, there exist several general music database APIs which can provide this information.

  • Consistency- As user-contributed data, much of the sampling database information is somewhat inconsistent, and has occasional missing information. This must be dealt with, especially in consideration of interfacing with other music APIs. 

Resulting questions:

• • Are there notable trends in sampling?

  • Is there a reason why some songs are sampled?

  • Are sampling and sampled songs correlated in some way?