Culture Briefs

Sued for sampling

“Bridgeport Music Inc. sued hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, accusing him of breaking the law when he recorded his 2003 single ‘Justify My Thug.’ The song is an obvious nod to Madonna’s ‘Justify My Love,’ but she is not the plaintiff. Instead, Bridgeport is suing because Jay-Z did something that is normal in hip-hop: sampling. He took a few notes, looped them in the background, and produced the tune. Bridgeport claims to own those notes, and is demanding a fortune in damages and a permanent ban on the distribution of the song.

“Bridgeport is an unwelcome addition to the music world: the ‘sample troll.’ … Bridgeport and companies like it hold portfolios of old rights (sometimes accumulated in dubious fashion) and use lawsuits to extort money from successful music artists for routine sampling, no matter how minimal or unnoticeable. … The trolls are turning copyright into the foe rather than the friend of musical innovation. … The sample trolls need to be stopped, either by Congress or by court rulings that establish sampling as a boon, not a burden, to creativity.”

— Tim Wu, writing on “Jay-Z Versus the Sample Troll,” Thursday in Slate at www.slate.com

D

ark Darwinism

“Socrates was made to drink hemlock for having ‘corrupted the youth of Athens.’ Is sociobiology or … ‘evolutionary psychology’ similarly corrupting? Although the study of evolution is … one of the most exciting and illuminating of all intellectual enterprises, there is at the same time … something dark about the implications of natural selection for our own behavior. …

“Beginning in the 1960s … the conceptual structure of modern evolutionary biology was changed. … Sociobiology was born on the wings of this scientific paradigm shift, whose underlying manifesto holds that the evolutionary process works most effectively at the smallest unit: that of individuals and genes, rather than groups and species. …

“With its increasingly clear demonstration that Hume, Freud, Brecht, and Nietzsche (also Machiavelli and Hobbes) are basically onto something, and that selfishness resides in our very genes, it would seem not only that evolution is a dispiriting guide to human behavior, but also that the teaching of sociobiology (or evolutionary psychology) should be undertaken only with great caution.”

— David P. Barash, writing on “The Social Responsibility in Teaching Sociobiology,” in the Nov. 17 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education

Freedom’s friend

“For all of his academic accomplishments, [Milton] Friedman’s role as a popularizer of free-market principles was arguably more important. He wrote a column in Newsweek for 18 years starting in 1966, preaching the importance of economic freedom to a generation that had never heard such things in school. His 1980 book, ‘Free to Choose,’ was a best-seller, and the videos that accompanied it were smuggled behind the Iron Curtain like seeds of revolution.

“Professor Friedman always argued with civility and a bracing wit. One of his best barbs on the size of government: ‘Given our monstrous, overgrown government structure, any three letters chosen at random would probably designate an agency or part of a department that could be profitably abolished.’ And he popularized ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’

“On the death of Ronald Reagan, whom he advised, Mr. Friedman wrote … that ‘few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom.’ The same can and long will be said of Milton Friedman.”

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