Free Example of Copyright Laws Essay

Abstract

The Internet in today’s world has been characterized by ‘mash-ups’ and remix. This article looks at the questions concerning the legality of engaging in sampling of music materials without the copyright owners’ permission as a culture of creativity. The article will review an increasing number of music mash-ups and what the mean for the copyright laws. Regarding remix context, the paper is going to look at Girl Talk remix and the issue of copyright laws infringement. D.J Girl Talk is a budding artist in the music industry who uses a laptop as his instrument. His real name is Gregg Gillis, and he samples music from the songs of other artists and uses them to create dance mixes. While Girl Talk has succeeded in the music industry by creating songs from other song samples, producers and artists complain that the D.J is illegally using their creations (Collie and Gorman 15).

The Copyright Laws of the United States

The copyright laws of the United States require that an artist must get permission from a copyright owner to user his or her work. However, regarding the works of Girl Talk, his work can be categorized   under the fair use exception of the copyright law (Levine 43). This doctrine of fair use exception applies to the work of Girl Talk because he uses too brief samples and the sounds from the music are totally different from the original version of the music. For this reason, his works are not likely to affect the original song’s sales.

Girl Talk is justified in his work as he expresses his level of creativity. Furthermore, copyright infringement should not be enforced here, as he is not interfering with the musical recordings. He only uses the parts of ready-made tracks in order to create a new sound. Gil Talk uses the music sampling for commercial purposes only just to make profit. In that respect, D.J Girl Talk use of sample music constitutes to the fair use, as the commercial use constitutes to the f air use under the copyright laws of United States.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the laws of copyright have to look at the balancing of the interest of the copyright owners and the new ideas brought in by other authors. In the same way, artists need to be provided with unlimited access to the materials that are copyrighted that will enable them to create and develop new works. This will be important to the original authors so that by the success of sampling artists, their works would be widely known and accepted by the public.