[MissHiss]

I'd have to say I somewhat disagree. A bit over a year ago I was working on a low budget movie project where a significant portion took place in a room where there was a TV on in the background. It would have been really exhausting to try to create realistic television audio in the background with ads and music, so we simply recorded about 30 minutes of television audio from several different cable networks. For the most part this stuff was low in the background and only an occasional few seconds here or there had audible words. But it was all copyrighted stuff. We called an attorney to determine the legality and were told it probably would fall under the fair use provision. He said at the time that if we were sued the plantiff(s) would have to either prove economic injury or that we were profiting directly from the copyrighted material.

There is, of course, a grey area, and it's actually quite a big grey area. One of the factors will actually be which court decides it, because different courts have interpreted it different ways. What dB is referring to is (I think) sometimes known as the "collage" issue. It's quite a controversy because, in general, there has been an acknowledgement that the basic principle of taking small samples for the creation of an artistic work is legitimate. But it seems to be impossible to define what is appropriate. Technically, you can be sued for sampling one note , but that doesn't mean the court will decide in the plantiffs favor. I do know that in the art world there is outrage that the law isn't more clear on the collage issue, and there is widespread agreement that congress needs to further define the fair use provision.

But beyond that, I know people who use samples all the time without paying royalties and have never been sued. Their work usually is restricted to a local audience, but that is, in fact, another dimension of the issue here. Samples used in a nationally, or internationally distributed work are far more likely to come to the attention of the original copyright holder.

I have used short samples on occasion myself. It's a judgement call. If I get sued, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. But I'm not going to spend a whole day trying to track somebody down to get permission to use 3 seconds of audio. That's an absolutely ridiculous waste of time. If I was doing CDs for a major label or working on a TV network show, that would be a different story. But even then I might push the envelope a bit -- simply because the envelope needs to be pushed a bit in this case.