COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS

Aired: Jan 19, 2010

Long before people began posting their homemade video mashups on the Web, hip-hop musicians were perfecting the art of
audio montage through sampling. Sampling — or riffing — is as old as music itself, but new technologies developed in
the 1980s and 1990s made it easier to reuse existing sound recordings. Acts like Public Enemy, De La Soul and the
Beastie Boys created complex rhythms, references and nuanced layers of original and appropriated sound. But by the early
1990s, sampling had collided with the law. When recording industry lawyers got involved, what was once called
“borrowed melody” became “copyright infringement.”

COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS examines the creative and commercial value of musical sampling, including the related debates over
artistic expression, copyright law and money. The film showcases many of hip-hop music’s founding figures like Public
Enemy, De La Soul and Digital Underground, as well as emerging artists such as audiovisual remixers Eclectic Method. It
also provides first-person interviews with artists who have been sampled, such as Clyde Stubblefield — James Brown's
drummer and the world's most sampled musician — and commentary by another highly sampled musician, funk legend George
Clinton.

Computers, mobile phones and other interactive technologies are changing our relationships with media, blurring the
line between producer and consumer and radically changing what it means to be creative. As artists find more inventive
ways to insert old influences into new material, COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS poses the question: Can you own a sound?

Format : AVI
Length : 466 MiB for 56mn 29s 139ms
Codec : XviD
Source : HDTV
Language : English US
Subtitles : None
Genre : Documenatary
Video #0 : MPEG-4 Visual at 1 009 Kbps
Aspect : 624 x 336 (1.857) at 23.976 fps
Audio #0 : MPEG Audio at 131 Kbps
Infos : 2 channels, 48.0 KHz
Enjoy!