Sure, but now you're making the argument that the legal basis may be there but that to you it doesn't matter. A court isn't going to be very receptive to such an argument I'm afraid.

It's pretty thin ice, and if you mess up it will get costly especially with something that sees high rotation.

It’s not thin ice because you can’t prove that a snare was added into a mix behind another snare and then pitched up a little and compressed a little. And artists hardly care much about it more than they care that someone has access to a certain vintage microphone. It’s just some sonic characteristic at that point.

I’m not talking about even noticeable sampling of a drum hit but the drum hit being used just to add to the existing drum track in the mix.

This is where transformative allowances come in as well, if not logically because no crime can be committed without any evidence.

I mean, IMO, copyrights on music samples are egregious. Hip hop is significantly transformative and was stymied by lawyers for decades. I’m sure that the best hip hop songs were never allowed to be made. I bet someone put together some absolute best of all time bangers with The Beatles, Micheal Jackson and Prince but they couldn’t get the rights. That trade isn’t worth it my opinion. Luckily the visual arts are more open minded. Richard Prince can be an artist by taking someone’s photo, doodling over it, and selling it for millions while owing nothing to the original photographer.

Good morning!

> This is where transformative allowances come in as well, if not logically because no crime can be committed without any evidence.

I really don't share that particular view. Crimes definitely can occur without evidence, there are plenty of examples. The fact that nobody gets convicted, that possibly the crime goes completely undetected does not mean that no crime occurred.

Let me give you one example of how this could happen: I was in charge of the audit of the 'RSB', a system that controlled a few 100B guilders way back in the day, mainframes were in, the PC/AT was 2 and ran at a whopping 8 Mhz and cost as much as a really good second hand car, Madonna releases 'True Blue'. The bank I worked for had for compliance reasons two physically separate entities, one to produce the code and the data, and another to keep track of it.

Initially I worked on the side that did the daily audits to make sure that everything was good. The process was specified thus: you will receive about 1/8th of a cubic meter of large format (132 column) printout at 7:30 AM. You have 30 minutes to manually review this (feel free to use a pocket calculator that can handle 13 digit numbers if you can find one and be sure to let us know where you found it) and release it, you better have a bloody good reason to not release it because it means that technically there is no opening balance for the day if that should happen. Clearly this is impossible, good luck.

On the first day of my new job, at 7:45 I realized that this is completely impossible so I went to see my boss. He told me that in practice the only known way to make sure that the most horrific of errors are caught is to go to the last page of the report first, check the two number all the way at the bottom of that page and see if they match up, this can be done in less than a minute. And if they match - which they always do - you can safely release the system, it's never been wrong.

So much for the oversight department. About a year later I got accepted as a junior programmer on the other side, and guess what, while there was a formal division between the personal side and the business side of the bank you had access to everything. This was well before ISO27001, security was something someone once may have read something about but we mostly focused on physical security. Once you were 'behind the red rope' you could do just about anything. Sure we had logins and passwords. Three letter login, three letter passwords were pretty common. The three letter logins were typically just the initials of the employee because there wasn't room for much more so those were trivial to guess and there was no upper limit on the number of tries on a password. So you could access pretty much all of the code and while there was a test environment there was no code review worth mentioning. And frankly, with very few exceptions most of the programmers weren't all that good. So it would have been trivial to:

- use someone elses account in the right group

- make a bunch of changes to the RSB system

- ensure that the report that went out to the audit department had matching numbers on the last row of the report

- and finally, to trigger all this say a year after leaving the bank

This likely would never have been discovered because their whole idea of threat modeling did not for one second stop and look at the 'rogue employee' angle, it was strictly a single line of defense: to get on to the 'floor' you had to have a badge that allowed access. The badges were an older Motorola system, brown plastic casing with a sticker on the front with your picture on it. Inside was a beefy pickup coil all the way around the case and a board with a little computer on it that would respond to being powered up by sending out a serial stream ID'ing the badge. That was it. No encryption, no challenge/response. And the ID? It could be set with a nice 8 position dip switch. Guess what ID #001 did?

So all of the requirements for an absolutely perfect crime were there, there would be no evidence and yet a crime would have been committed. There were many other such opportunities, that bank really relied way too much on trust and I would not have been surprised to find out that they had been hacked horribly from the inside without being able to point at the culprit.

The bank was founded in 1918, well before the age of computers and it processed a small mountain of paper every day. On that front their procedures were pretty good. But on the digital side they were - frankly - absolutely hopeless. The gear they used then was old enough that some of it was still labelled 'Sperry Rand' which the company was no longer fielding for about a decade at that time. IT was a cost, security non existent and any half competent coder would have seen 1001 possibilities to defraud that bank, and get away with it cleanly. Maybe some even did.

Sorry, I’m unfamiliar with civil law societies but here in the Anglosphere if there is no body, there is no murder.

Obviously a witness testimony of a person being tossed into a volcano is evidence of a body, etc.

So maybe they are locking up and trying people in Europe without evidence of crimes as being committed and having people shift the burden of proof to the accused but here in the United States we really do assume that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

Our courts don’t expect to waste time either. Why would they hear complaints without evidence? Why would they hear a trivial complaint?

Part of the disconnection I have in these conversations is that people skip over the legal details and want to go right to some deep philosophical discussion about originality or justice, which is fine, but also super annoying because our legal system has developed a pretty sophisticated understanding of those concepts through literal millennia of trial and error.

The current legal system works so much better than whatever I hear commonly described in these comments. If you let nerds get involved the courts would be nothing but people nitpicking over the finest of useless details in some vain attempt to score argument points, as if they’ve been trained on upvotes for decades.

There’s real wisdom in legal practice and I’m always going to lean heavily on those practices when talking about legal matters like copyright.

Originality in art is a different conversation entirely and frankly even if the courts want to view 10ms audio samples as worthy of copyright (which I’m pretty sure they would not concern themselves with), from an artistic standpoint I’m fully onboard with the idea that the musician who chopped up that sample into indistinguishable parts and then made new music is the sole author of an original work.

Ethically, copyright goes too far the moment is begins to choke the public domain and that yes, this weighs the needs of a given individual against anyone else. I’m sure the first person to record a I-IV-V progression would prefer to get a dollar every time a future composer used that but that would clearly be stifling to art in general. Copyright law in the US has evolved to capture this same ethical understanding and it’s not the only embedded wisdom.

I'll just leave this here for now. I'm sure you'll have plenty of reasons to say that 'there was evidence after all' but 'no body no murder' is at least to my reading simply not true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_conviction_without_a_bo...

Other observations about how legal systems elsewhere work are ignored on account of the opening sentence.

I stated in plain English that a murder needs a body is not to be taken literally. Obviously evidence is still required. I used an example of witness testimony.

So at this point have you run out of any ammo other than meaningless nitpicks?