I've finally finished the redesign on the web site (at last!) but there is no rest for the weary as I am forced to blast the pinheads at the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, who have shown their collective ignorance and their willingness to shill for the record industry, whose track record of anti-artist arm-twisting is more pronounced than in any other industry.

In short, they have ruled all sampling of music illegal without payment of licensing fees, "even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music" (quote from the Associated Press).

Weirdly, when I talk to people about this, they expect that as an artist I would applaud this decision as some sort of victory for artists, but it is not that at all. It is a stifling of legitimate artistic expression, an appalling lack of subtlety in understanding about how culture develops and is loaded with racist overtones to boot.

Artists have been pulling pieces out of the sea of cultural flotsam as long as we've been making art. Hip-hop is the pre-eminent expression of that particular form of cultural logic, one that has shown itself to be one of the most resonant and salient of our day. (left, DJ Spooky and Ryuichi Sakamoto make art)

What hip-hop artists and mixologists do is only the moral equivalent of tearing out scraps of magazine pages and advertisements and putting them down on canvas as a new piece of art. Picasso anyone? Rauschenberg? Not to mention Gerhard Richter, Roy Lichtenstein, Vik Muniz, Thomas Ruff, and a whole host of others who have entire bodies of work based on taking an existing cultural artifact and basically re-rendering it, fully recognizable. (right, Robert Rauschenberg "#62 Features from Currents," 1970, Hey Bob, did you pay licensing fees to all those newspapers, writers and photographers?)

Copyright, originally meant to balance the needs of individual artists with the need for society to exchange ideas freely, has been completely perverted to serve some kind of "mine-all-mine" mentality. We're so paranoid that we're afraid someone might take a single chord from a piece of music, recontextualize it, transform it, in short make it sublime and that we might not get our 26 cents for it. We'd rather that art not get made at all. As a cultural society, we have lost all sense of artistic generosity, and have let ourselves be tricked into thinking that the logic of capitalist opportunism is the only viable way of thinking about our art.

Unfortunately, there is a long history of mainstream society seeing primarily black artforms as threatening to the social order. Drums were outlawed on plantations. Radio stations had strict policies against playing R&B music in the 50s. Displaced racial anxiety even had a lot to do with the violent late-70s anti-disco fervor, which took on the sanctimonious glow of a religious crusade, though that was equally about hating women, too. (left, talking drum, feared as communication device)

The court has set artists way back on this one. The so-called aggrieved musicians will see precious little remuneration, as most of it will go to industry lawyers, and the art of sampling will simply go back underground. Meanwhile we'll all be missing out on a lot of great art. Oh and watch out collage artists; you're next.

As someone who used to fill out billable hours forms at a law firm, I thought the same thing when I read the decision. The fact that samples are "minor, unrecognizable snippets" should in itself make them fair use. Using 'found' items in other forms of art is a good comparison. The people who rendered that decision must not listen to contemporary music much.

Seems to be a self-contradictory ruling.

I'm a photographer. If we extend this criminilization of sampling to architectural photography, for example, me and a lot of other camera totin fiends would be on the wrong side of the law.