Today's news - Kraftwerk Victorious

Could the Economist have found a more dire photo? Oh right, this is Kraftwerk,,,

So it seems that the German courts have gone where few dare tread and ruled on a case that involves sampling and appropriation. According to a December 18  post on the Economist's website:

Like all of these sorts of things, the narrative is tricky. It seems that in a 1977 song, Kraftwerk created a sound in a song called Metall Auf Metall that caught the ears of producers Moses Pelham and Martin Haas, who used it in a 19997 song called Nur Mir. This being the latter quarter of the 20th century, Kraftwerk sued. The case has been working its way through the German courts for a dozen years, and finally the German Supreme Court ruled in favor of Kraftwerk, saying (in the words of the Economist):

The question at the heart of the case is how far sampling the work of other artists—a mainstay of modern hip-hop and techno—is permissible when creating new music. The answer given by the Supreme Court is that it is only permissible if the same effect could not have been produced by the new artist himself. After various demonstrations by expert witnesses, crashing metal on metal and using instruments such as a 1996 Akai Sampler, it was shown that an imitation of the sound-bite would have been possible in 1997.

So, if I understand this correctly, the decision has to do with what is technologically possible, not what the use of another recording might mean. This a bit of a bummer for those of us who are hoping for a more open culture and less choking control on those things that are already in the world.

One remediates (my new word for using another's images, words or sound in another work) often because one wants to be in conversation with the original work - not just because it sounds cool. The whole point is for readers, viewers, or listeners to recognize other's voices as an integral part of making your own voice. We are, all of us, patched together from borrowed pieces of codes, little snippets of other's identities that surface from time to time. Trying to control that is like trying to stop the tide from coming in...it's not a question of what a machine can do, but what a person needs to do something...