ABSTRACTA COMPULSORY LICENSE FOR DIGITAL MUSIC SAMPLING:HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND FUTURE GUIDELINESByCorey MetcalfOver the past three decades, digital music sampling has become a cornerstone of modern music production, and is reflective of a larger movement towards collage and re-appropriation across the arts.Despite this fact, the legal paradigm surrounding the clearance of samples remains full of inefficiencies and unfairness, with unnecessarily high transaction costs on both sides of the sale, and some potential purchasers of licenses being shut out completely. The option of a compulsory license has been used to solve similar problems in many areas of intellectual property, including mechanical licenses in the area of music itself. This paper looks at the legal, economic, technological, and creative history of digitalmusic sampling and argues that the creation of a compulsory license for sampling would be a worthwhile endeavor, ultimately benefitting the three most important stakeholders in sampling: the party being sampled, the party doing the sampling, and the audience for sample-based music. In the final chapters, guidelines for how such a license might look are presented, and the actual process for how a compulsory license might be created is explored.
Read
