Sampling?

[grimepoch]

Question: there are samples of sound effects and vocals I'd like to use from some older movies, how does one go about getting permission, and even further, what would be the costs typically?

Thanks!

[qo]

Hi Rick. There was a discussion yesterday on a local user-supported station (KPFA) here in San Jose about using samples in rap production. On of the guests was a fairly big time rapper (I typically don't follow hip hop, so had never heard of him) who uses samples from old movies.

He said that he'd tried really hard to use this material legitimately, but that there's no consistent process in place (like e.g. an industry sample clearinghouse) and prices are all over the map (mostly exorbitantly high).

So, he doesn't even bother being legit anymore. He put it like this (paraphrasing):

If these companies that are making it so hard to reuse material have the time, resources, and dollars to scrutinize every bell, snare, giggle, fart, or whatever, in my music, to determine if it's lifted from one of their 40 year old movies then more power to them. If they can catch me, and can prove the fart sound is theirs after I've reversed it and effected it and combined it with other sounds, then fine, come and get me. But, it's a two way street. Rap is a billion dollar business for the record companies, but at the same time they're stunting this industry by placing hurdles in our way, almost every step of the way, when it comes to making new material out of existing material

I think he has a point, up to a point. Certainly, he doesn't if we're talking about extended samples consisting of large sections of dialog verbatim. But for the odd theremin sound that was ubiquitous in those old thriller flicks of the 50's, I'd say you're probably pretty safe in using them and that the hassle of trying to pay for stuff like this isn't worth it because, other than stock royalty-free sound effect libraries, there are just too many hoops to jump through.

[m2]

posted August 04, 2005 12:49 PM                         
Question: there are samples of sound effects and vocals I'd like to use from some older movies, how does one go about getting permission,

Like the above folks stated you can probably get away with taking very small sniglets of SFX, car horns, crashes, farts and the like.
By vocals we usually mean a singers part on a song recording. That would be hard to separate out. If by vocals' you mean dialog, then you have a problem. Some actor's performance and the text itself is still someone's intellectual property. Unless the performer is long dead and the piece is out of copywrite. [eg public domain.] Most all 40 year old movies are still under some studio's ownership. if you have the DVD or tape that you sourced the material from you can easily look on the cover to find who the copywrite owner is. If not you can look it up on IMDB.com and find out who you would need to contact. It may not be as hard as you think. And unless you are doing porn they usually want just a nomial fee.

Stealing is still stealing. So you just have to figure out who you want to be at the end of the day.

[edised]

You can still use copyleft content if you wish...
have a look at http://archive.org

Most of the content is under creative commons licences...

it's free

[edised]

to be precise

go to "open source audio"

then chose your category (spoken words etc...)
there are open source movies as well...

[grimepoch]

Yes, I've certainly tapped that resource, two of the songs I've written have been inpired by samples I found on there! But thanks for posting that, I am sure others might not know about it and it is a good resource.