Small amount of use is not copyright infringement.

The minor usage rule is a special rule of copyright infringement exception in American copyright law. If the ordinary audience cannot perceive the defendant's use of the plaintiff's works, then the use is minor and does not infringe the copyright. But for a long time, whether this rule applies to sound recordings has been controversial.

in copyright litigation, in addition to the use behavior, the plaintiff also needs to prove that the defendant's use behavior exceeds the micro-use. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in the case of Newton v. Diamond, which was decided in 24, explained the rule of micro-use: the unauthorized use of other people's works only constitutes an indictable act when it has a substantial impact.

Extended information:

Case:

In June p>216, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made a judgment on the infringement case of VMG Salsoul (Seso) Record Company v. Madonna and Warner Music Company, and made it clear that the de minimis copying rule is applicable to both general works and sound recordings.

In this case, Madonna used a .23-second wind music clip from the song Love Break in the song Vogue, and the plaintiff sued her for copyright infringement. The Central District Court of California, USA, made a summary judgment on this case, and found that the sampling of the song was a trace use.

The jury won't think that an ordinary listener can recognize that there is a short clip from Love Break when listening to the song Vogue, so the defendant's use of the song clip neither infringes the copyright of the musical work nor the copyright of the recorded product. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the district court's decision on the application of the micro-use rule.

There are differences between the two works

Music sampling may involve the minor use of music works and sound recordings, so two different types of copyright objects need to be discussed separately. For music works, we should judge the general way of playing songs, that is, compare the scores of plaintiffs and defendants; For a sound recording, we should consider how the performer plays the work in practice, and focus on the differences between the sound recording and the music played in a common way.

as for the infringement of music works, in this case, the defendant extracted two different pieces of wind music from the song "Love Break". First of all, the defendant extracted the wind music score material of the quarter notes in the plaintiff's song, but in the arrangement of the song, the defendant used this material differently from the plaintiff's arrangement.

because of the different positions of the four-note wind music score materials used by both parties for music lyrics, the music score in Love Break is arranged as: two-minute rest notes, four-minute rest notes and single-note wind music. However, in Vogue, the score arrangement is: binary rest notes, octave rest notes, single clarinet music and octave rest notes.

Secondly, the defendant used the score passages of the plaintiff's double-sounding pipe music. In both songs, the score arrangement is: binary rest note, octave rest note, octave note and quarter note. To sum up, what the defendant sampled most was the whole musical score paragraph of single quarter notes and double clarinet music.

does music sampling infringe copyright? -People's Network