Events
Monthly luncheon meetings for CincyIP are held on the second Tuesday of each month from 11:45-1:30. Additional meetings will be scheduled pending interest and speaker availability.
Date: Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Event: Digital Sampling
Speaker: Tracy Reilly.
Tracy Reilly, who teaches Real Property and Intellectual Property courses, was most recently a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP in Chicago, where she worked in the areas of intellectual property, entertainment, advertising, Internet, and e-commerce law. Previously, she was an associate at Garfinkle & Associates, practicing entertainment, intellectual property, marketing, and promotional law. Her clients have included Kraft, Sara Lee, Kellogg, Honeywell, Madison Dearborn Partners, United Airlines, the Chicago Sun -Times, Rand McNally, and the estates of gospel star Mahalia Jackson and Charles Stepney, producer for Earth, Wind & Fire.
Prof. Reilly also has experience as an adjunct professor at the Valparaiso University School of Law in Indiana, the University of Chicago Graham School of Business, and Lewis University in Illinois. She clerked for the Honorable Wayne R. Andersen in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and for the Honorable Anne M. Burke in the Appellate Court of Illinois.
She serves on the board of the Theatre Museum in New York, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the history of Broadway. She has also served as Vice-Chair of the Entertainment Committee of the Chicago Bar Association. Her scholarship is focused in the areas of copyright and trademark law.
Topic:
Since the emergence of digital sampling technology in the 1970’s, courts and legal scholars alike have failed to fully appreciate the true nature and consequences of allowing legally unchecked digital sampling—that is, until the recent Sixth Circuit decision in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films, holding that defendants’ unlicensed sampling of three notes of a copyrighted sound recording constituted a per se infringement. This decision marked the first time a court hearing a sampling case truly discerned the subtle but existent differences between sampling a musical composition and sampling a sound recording, and applied the Copyright Act accordingly.
While the sampling technique is properly recognized as an art form in and of itself, unethical and unlawful use of a certain kind and/or a certain amount of a sampled musician’s prior work amounts to copyright infringement if the owner of the sound recording that has been sampled has not consented to such use. This presentationwill provide an overview of the history and continued growth of the modern technology that enables what is known as digital sampling and discuss the response of the courts and the music industry to sampling and the courts’ various and inconsistent attempts to reconcile sampling practices with the current language of the Copyright Act and other laws, including the Bridgeport Music case. Finally, a summary of the continuing moral and ethical debate in the music industry over whether sampling is “art” or merely “theft.”
Time: 11:45am
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