Sampling in Recorded Music

Within society everything is recycled. What is music sampling? "Legally it's pretty straight forward, if you take a piece of someone else's recording then you have to secure rights to do that." However, how do you know if you are breaking the law or expressing creativity. The music industry being the most influential to the human civilization makes it easily adaptable to society. With this being said all the copyright laws make it harder for the music industry to have complete freedom in their music processes.

In the music industry we hear all too often that there is a law suit going on that has to do with borrowing of music or sampling music by big name artists. One of the more recent law suits involved Lil Wayne being sued by Karma-Ann Sawanepoel for sampling her song Once. With the sample of her song Lil Wayne created one of his more well known songs I feel like dying. The whole law suit created many problems for Lil Wayne. He was under the impression that everything was taken care of for sampling her song.

Sampling within the music industry not only creates new songs that the public loves but it also can create some massive legal problems for the artists if all the copyrights are not taken care of properly. The music industry is one of the largest industries that is still having problems with copyright laws and following them for the most part. Could all the problems be because these copyright laws are too restricting for the artists to have all the control over their music that they would like to have? Sampling is the music industry's own form of piracy that is key to how the industry got to where it is today. Sampling made the music industry for the most part as big as it is today.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/04/lil_waynes_latest_legal_issue.html