Word: fragment
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With millions of dollars in royalties at stake, sampling has become a legal quagmire. U.S. copyright law protects a composer from having his work duplicated by another musician. But what happens if the second party samples only a few seconds of a melody? Or just a fragment of drumbeat? "The latest copyright law went into effect on Jan. 1, 1978, and it was out of date pretty much the day it was passed," observes Jeffrey Light, a Beverly Hills-based entertainment lawyer. "Sampling is just another instance of the law not keeping up with technology...
...borders of Mexico to the north, Honduras to the south and Guatemala to the west. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was the haunt of Spanish bucaneros and English slavers, of logwood cutters and warm-sea riffraff. In 1981 it achieved independence, and today it is the last fragment of the British Commonwealth on Central American soil, the smallest sovereign state on the whole continent (pop. about 200,000) and politically the least eventful...
...Vanilla Ice were a music major at Harvard, he would almost certainly be expelled for submitting the bass line to "Ice, Ice Baby" as his own work. I'm not suggesting that sampling of other artists' songs should be eliminated. But if the sample is a recognizable fragment of the other song, the sampler should seek written permission (and, if the original artist requests, pay something...
...fragment of poetry by the Greek Archilochus recorded these enigmatic lines: "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing." In a famous essay, Isaiah Berlin described Tolstoy as a fox who knew many things and Dostoyevsky as a hedgehog who knew one big thing. The Old Paradigm knew one big thing (centralized government, one organizing ideology, one big idea). The New Paradigm is a fox that accommodates many things -- it is decentralized, undoctrinaire, pragmatic, multifaceted...
...does plodding research on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash; Maud Bailey, a dedicated feminist, is interested in another 19th century poet, Christabel LaMotte. (Neither Ash nor LaMotte existed, but Byatt creates excerpts from their imaginary poems and journals that bring them vibrantly alive.) Roland stumbles across a tantalizing fragment of evidence that the respectably married Ash and the spinster LaMotte may have had an illicit affair; such an event, if proved, would set the scholarly world on its ear. Before long, he and Maud join forces to track down the truth...