Music Sampling and Plagiarism

Digital music sampling has become a centralized idea and notion in pop culture in today’s era. The copyright laws that go hand in hand with digital music sampling, however, have created restrictions that some view to be a barrier for ingenuity and creativeness. People that have sampled before view music sampling as creating a “collage,” the collage includes different sounds and textures that create a unique piece to listen to and enjoy. Where this is true, I believe that credit is deserved where credit is due. If one is taking large segments from an artist’s song and only twisting it slightly, this should not be legal to repackage and sell. In the audio recording, “Digital Music Sampling: Creativity or Criminality,” it mentions the fact that there could be more specific copyright laws within songs. For example, copyrighting the guitar or drum piece of a song so that it actually is illegal for people to take an artist’s work if the artist so wishes to put those constraints within their music. On the other hand, the audio recording had an interesting point when they mentioned that music sampling could actually help out artists, especially older genres of music, by using sampling as a marketing technique. Older genres of music are rediscovered this way, I myself have heard remixes of old songs and have ended up going and purchasing the snippet of an old song I heard in the background of a remixed song.

These days, however, our generation seems to feel as if they are entitled to anything and everything. When it comes to plagiarism, there is nothing creative about cutting and pasting an Internet article into a word document. Writing a paper for a class is not the same as it was years ago when the only way you had access to information was by going to the library and searching for material in actual books. Today, information is a few clicks away; information is at the ready within seconds. Our generation needs to realize that it is not okay to create a paper based off of other people's words and ideas.