New CIRG Team Study on the Ethics of Sampling and Its Clash with Copyright Law

Pavel Zahrádka, Ivan David, Rudolf Leška, and Miroslav Krša have prepared a study on the ethics of music remixing and the impact of copyright law on sampling in contemporary popular music, which has just been published in the journal Popular Music and Society.

The study Copyright and the Ethics of Sampling: The Lesson of the Czech Music Scene was published in open access in Popular Music and Society.

 

The authors analyze the attitudes of Czech musicians and producers of electronic music and hip hop toward copyright law and examine the impact of the copyright system on the work of sampling and remixing artists who use parts of other people’s music recordings in their creations. The study also reconstructs ethical criteria for assessing good and bad practices in working with excerpts from third-party music recordings. Legal uncertainty motivates musicians to replace legal norms with their own moral norms for creative copying of other artists’ works. In the conclusion, based on the collection and analysis of qualitative data obtained from interviews and a questionnaire distributed among sampling musicians and electronic music producers on the Czech music scene, the study evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of possible legislative as well as non-legislative (commercial) solutions to the conflict between copyright law and remix culture.