Elephant Magazine published a a review of the Common Property exhibition by Robert Shore on their blog on 10th February.
Roberts mentions the ‘Amen Break’, a six-second drum loop taken from a 1960s recording by the funk and soul group The Winstons which, according to whosampled.com, has been sampled 1,862 times since—without a single royalty or clearance payment being made to the original musicians for its use. ‘It’s basically been in every hip-hop song since the Eighties,’ says Roberts, who is pleased that a recent crowdfunding campaign raised £24,000 for the Winstons’ frontman Richard Spencer. At the same time he’s clear that artists and musicians should be allowed to work more freely with copyright-protected sources where the uses are, to repeat the term mentioned above and employed in the courts (just in case you find yourself summoned), ‘transformative’. ‘It’s not plagiarism,’ he says. ‘It’s cutting and pasting. Culture is made in that way. People take it and morph it into something new. If you had to pay for everything, it would be impossible.’
Read the full feature on their website.