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With millions of dollars in royalties at stake, sampling has become a legal quagmire. U.S. copyright law protects a composer from having his work duplicated by another musician. But what happens if the second party samples only a few seconds of a melody? Or just a fragment of drumbeat? "The latest copyright law went into effect on Jan. 1, 1978, and it was out of date pretty much the day it was passed," observes Jeffrey Light, a Beverly Hills-based entertainment lawyer. "Sampling is just another instance of the law not keeping up with technology."
Vanilla Ice ran into the problem when he was accused of lifting part of the 1981 song Under Pressure, written by David Bowie and Queen, for his No. 1 hit $ Ice Ice Baby. When Bowie and Queen threatened a lawsuit, the rapper eventually added them to the composer credits. Two years ago, the rap group De La Soul was slapped with a $1.7 million suit by the '60s group the Turtles for using an uncredited bite of their 1969 song You Showed Me. M.C. Hammer avoided such problems by sharing credit with Rick James, who wrote Super Freak, before sampling the song for his platinum single, U Can't Touch This.
Artists and music publishers are struggling to settle disputes out of court by devising elaborate formulas to divvy up royalties between samplers and samplees. "Everybody is going to go ahead doing it," predicts Light, "except now they're going to get their approvals before they make a record. If you go to somebody after you've got a hit and try to cut a deal, they're going to take you to the cleaners."
Not all unauthorized sampling ends in discord. Tom's Diner, an a cappella tune by Suzanne Vega, had been known only to fans who owned her 1987 album, Solitude Standing. Then late last year a couple of audacious remix artists who call themselves DNA sampled Vega's voice and grafted it onto a throbbing beat. Vega liked the new version so much that she asked her record company to release it. The resulting Top Five single was the surprise hit of 1990.
While that cut-and-paste approach to pop may not work for everyone, sampling may well be a permanent part of the musical landscape. And what's wrong with that? The arts have a long tradition of allusion and quotation, often with resonant effects. In pop music the only danger of sampling is that performers will use it as a crutch for the imagination, rather than a tool to help liberate it.