Kembrew McLeod’s story about How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop in Stay Free! Magazine is an interesting tale of how copyright kills culture.
In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one […] sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot.
Remember: CopyFight.