A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that rap artists should pay for every musical sample included in their work — even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music.

The case centers on the NWA song "100 Miles and Runnin," which samples a three-note guitar riff from "Get Off Your Ass and Jam" by '70s funk-master George Clinton and Funkadelic.

In the two-second sample, the guitar pitch has been lowered, and the copied piece was "looped" and extended to 16 beats. The sample appears five times in the new song.

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What about the "fair use" standard that applies to small portions of a work? Is that gone too? Is an author now not to quote a sentence from another book or publication w/o first obtaining a license?

Utter copyright regime silliness.

It kind of begs the question, if they were going to alter the sample so much, why didn't they just hire a bass player to play the notes the way they wanted them? Musicians have been getting inspiration from each other since music began.

You just have to keep that within reason, as George Harrison found out.

If you sample the work w/o permission, and use that sample for your own profit, you should be somewhat at the original artist's mercy. Now, some laws limiting the recourse of the original artist could be useful, as a simple sample like that could be turned into major profit for them if they have good lawyers, rather than a small royalty and credits,

Quoting and using samples for reference and experimental purposes would be entirely different (for example, I imagine many listening samples hosted for tests here that are under copyright are certainly being fairly used).