The Sixth Circuit told samplers to get a license or not sample

The audio task

A producer deciding whether a two-second guitar lick, pitched down and looped, needs a license before it goes into a track is asking exactly the question a federal appeals court answered in 2005, in a ruling that set a stricter clearance standard than several other circuits use for the same conduct.

What the documents show

The Sixth Circuit's opinion in Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films, decided June 3, 2005, describes a sample taken from the sound recording Get Off Your Ass and Jam: a three-note guitar riff was copied, pitch-lowered, looped and extended, then used in the recording 100 Miles and Runnin', which appeared in the film I Got the Hook Up. The court read 17 U.S.C. section 114(b), which the statute's own text at Cornell's Legal Information Institute confirms limits a sound-recording copyright's exclusion to recordings made entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds. Because the defendants had copied actual sounds rather than independently re-creating them, the panel held that a sound-recording copyright owner has the exclusive right to sample its own recording, adopting what it called a get-a-license-or-do-not-sample rule and rejecting a de minimis or substantial-similarity exception for sound recordings specifically.

Rights status

The opinion is explicit about what it decided and what it left alone: it addresses only sound-recording copyrights under section 114(b), not the separate copyright in the underlying musical composition, and it binds only the Sixth Circuit's own jurisdiction. The court acknowledged, without resolving, that other circuits might reach a different result by applying ordinary substantial-similarity analysis instead of its bright-line rule.

What to check before you use it

This is an editorial checklist. Before treating this ruling as the governing rule for a sample, confirm which circuit's law applies to the intended release and distribution. Separate the sound-recording clearance, governed by this case, from the composition clearance, which follows ordinary substantial-similarity rules. And check the sample's actual technical history, since the ruling turned on whether the sound was copied rather than independently performed.

• Which federal circuit's sampling precedent applies to where the track will be distributed?
• Has the underlying composition been cleared separately from the sound recording?
• Was the disputed sound copied from a fixed recording, or independently re-performed?

Bridgeport's bright-line rule remains one of the clearest statements in sampling law, and one of the narrowest: a strict answer for sound-recording copies, in one circuit, that other courts have chosen not to universally follow.