Da Sampling: Authorship and Fair Use in Daft Punk's "Da Funk" (Blog Post #5)

Our hot topic right now is sampling and fair use as it relates to the idea of sampling. Who really owns the content? Is it right for an artist to sample another artist's work and call it their own? It's widely up to debate. To provide some substance to this theoretical debate, I took a look at an example of sampling myself, and picked a track that has a lot of nostalgic value for me.

Daft Punk are a duo of two amazing musicians, nay, pioneers, responsible for some of the finest electronic music of the 90's and 2000's. "Da Funk" is one of their most popular early hits from the album "Homework." What many may not know, however, is that this song actually contains two samples from other songs in the liquid beats and synths. Daft Punk use a drum hit from Barry White's "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby" early on in the song, and utilize a drum groove from Vaughan Mason and Crew's "Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll" throughout the tune. This usage of other artists' tunes raises a few important questions about copyright and ownership for us. Is it really right for Daft Punk to consider this song their own, even though they took samples from two other artists? The answer, in my opinion, is yes. I think one of the most important things we need to consider in a debate on musical sampling is how big of a sample is being used, as well as the way that the sample is being utilized. If Daft Punk had been making a funk song, and simply ripped the drum track out of "Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll," that may have been a concern, as they're just blatantly stealing a full part of the song, but that's not the case here. Instead, Daft Punk use very small bits from these tracks to add some spice to their beats. Unless a website like whosampled actually pointed out the usage of these tracks, it is doubtful you would ever make the correlation between Da Funk and either of those tunes.

Would these gents steal anything?

So that takes us to a question of fair use. Under fair use, copyrighted material can be used for satirical or educational purposes legally. Does this fall under that blanket? Not really. This kind of use is neither satirical nor educational. Another problem for Daft Punk is that, unlike in the case of Chander and Sunder's Mary Sues, these two gentlemen are selling this material and profiting from it, which definitely violates the ideas of a fair use agreement.

However, I hold to the idea that these two are not crooks, they aren't stealing these tunes. Not only are the samples short and used in a way that make something truly original, it engages the ideas of the Remix Manifesto presented in the REMix movie we saw. One of the key points was the idea of the past having too much control over the future. While Da Funk came out in 1995, the two songs it sampled are from the 1970s. While copyright is important for protecting the intellectual property of content creators, we really have to think about how far we ought to go to protect these properties. By 1995, the property of the songs sampled in Da Funk are no longer relevant, the artists practically non-existent, so why is there a question of whether or not Daft Punk have the right to use the small samples they did?