Joanna Demers

Short book about music and IP law which skims over some of the details (to be fair, the details are so complex that most IP lawyers don’t understand them). I liked her basic argument about how the law had changed music, especially music that relies on sampling, in a variety of contradictory ways: underground, creativity continues to flourish, except that its practitioners understand they can’t go mainstream, which is a constraint of its own. Meanwhile, big-label artists don’t sample show more recognizable works, or only do so as a show of excess wealth—they can afford to license a sample from The Police, which means forking over half or more of what they make off a song. Most provocatively, Demers argues that part of the shift to sampling non-R&B music, including “world” music, comes from a desire to target works that are less recognizable, which therefore can be exploited with less legal risk, because the owners—if any are still around—are less likely to come after the samplers, and less likely to be able to make out their cases. Moreover, she suggests that the growing technical ability to produce soundalikes will soon change the sampling landscape even further. show less