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Business News Legal
Madonna defeats Vogue sample lawsuit
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 19 November 2013
Madonna has successfully defeated an uncleared sample lawsuit relating to her 1990 hit ‘Vogue’, though it’s not thought the ruling will greatly alter more general principles on sampling in US copyright law.
As previously reported, American music company VMG sued Madonna and ‘Vogue’ producer Robert ‘Shep’ Pettibone last year, claiming the duo illegally used a sample from a 1970s recording called ‘Love Break’, which the claimant owns, for their hit single back in 1990. The music firm said that Pettibone had cleverly hidden the sample, but that new technology had revealed that it is definitely there, which is why they were suing over two decades later.
As it turned out the legal claim related to a “single horn stab” that appears in both ‘Love Break’ and ‘Vogue’, an alleged sample so short that the court basically said it would be impossible to construct a case for copyright infringement.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the judge ruled: “Having listened to the sound recordings of ‘Love Break’ and ‘Vogue’, the court finds that no reasonable audience would find the sampled portions qualitatively or quantitatively significant in relation to the infringing work, nor would they recognise the appropriation. The court finds that any sampling of the horn hit was de minimis or trivial”.
Quite how many notes need to be borrowed from one track for another before a licence is required is a frequent debate in copyright circles, though the precedent in the US is rather strict on the matter, a 2006 case over a Funkadelic sample in an NWA track being very clear that a two-second sample used without licence constituted infringement.
The judge in this latest case was keen to stress her ruling didn’t contradict or revise that precedent, rather saying that the issue here was that the alleged sample was so hard to hear, there were too many ambiguities as to whether appropriation had or had not taken place. So it’s not the size of the tiny sample that matters, it’s how distinct it is. Or something like that.
Legal reps for Madonna et al told the Reporter: “We are thrilled with the decision, and believe it is absolutely the right result”.
