Ethan Hein's Blog

This song finished Nas’ career! Shined a lot of light on his “fake” facade of an image, while Jay-Z’s career is an open book! This song & album propelled Jay-Z’s career, while Nas just reacted & played catch up until it was just pointless. That’s when he joined DefJam while Jay-Z was president. Jay-Z finished him the old fashioned way: he took everything from him (crown, his woman & his fame!!).

Jay-Z spoke the truth! Nas was just mad he banged his baby-moms! One’s now on top, one isn’t! Do the math!

The book does address these issues in depth — it’s written by two copyright attorneys. I recommend it highly. This issue of copyrighting folk songs is a complex one. The book deals with it only briefly; it’s mostly concerned with modern sampling practice. But there’s quite a bit of intellectual overlap. In the case of Alan Lomax and “Rosie,” even a good-faith effort to uncover an original author of that song would have been fruitless; it no more has a single author than the Bible does.

The sample comes from the full KRS-One song, it just samples the very beginning when the vocal is unaccompanied. Though in general, if you sample an a capella version of a song, I’m not sure how copyright law applies. Someone who’s more of an expert than me will have to weigh in.

This is not correct. There is widespread public ignorance of the fact that the rules for music publishing copyright are not the same at all as those for print publishing, but are sui generis, and date back to the sheet music era. Under music publishing laws both publisher and author receive royalty income, split 50 / 50. These percentages can be and frequently are further subdivided in various ways among producers and arrangers. (Today recording artists normally form their own publishing companies to avoid having to give half their royalty income away.) After World War 2, when the sheet music publishers realized that they were losing income to the recording industry, they figured out they could make up the loss through publishing copyright income; and they began to raid the field of traditional music and copyright everything they could get their hands on, usually using pseudonyms and spinoff companies. They raided the entire Lomax catalog, claiming that the songs in the Lomax books, which had been edited and arranged by the Lomaxes, were public domain. The fact that the publishers agreed to a settlement demonstrate their awareness of the weakness in their case. However, Lomax would have preferred to have been offered a share from the publisher’s half rather than the artists’ half of the publishing right, as was not infrequently done. Lomax was advised by his lawyers, however, that the pockets of the music publishers were too deep for him to fight against. It may be argued that the attacks on the Lomaxes that persisted over the years were calculated to distract the public from the publisher’s role and to make him a scapegoat. Redbaiting may have also played a convenient role in this.

By the way…here’s the video.

I completely agree that Lomax isn’t any worse than anyone else in his era and position, and in many ways better. I think the problem is the system of laws and values that Lomax and the musicians he recorded were working within. I don’t have anything against Lomax in particular; it’s more the idea that anyone at all should be able to own folk music that bothers me.