Even though solicitors will typically have a particular field, locality or area of expertise that they will prioritise, legal decisions set in other localities and even different market sectors can have surprising effects on existing precedents.

A particularly notable example of this not only fundamentally changed the career of an up-and-coming musical artist and the genre he performed in, but also affected intellectual property and the concept of ownership as a whole.

The Legal Minefield Of Assemblage

Hip-hop as a genre grew from spinning and rapping over existing tracks, and throughout the 1980s, the use of sampling became increasingly extensive, epitomised by the likes of Public Enemy’s Fight The Power, which used dozens of copyrighted samples, each of which was less than a second long.

Exactly what was allowed was still not entirely understood by recording artists, perhaps most infamously characterised by Vanilla Ice claiming that a very slight change made his Ice Ice Baby not an infringement on Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure.

A precedent for what was and was not okay needed to be set, and the unfortunate centrepiece of this legal dispute was a rising star who became a one-hit wonder because of it.

Better Off Alone Again (Naturally)

Marcel Theo Hall was a record producer and hip-hop rapper who went by the stage name Biz Markie.

Initially known for his beatboxing skills, he was a very popular member of the East Coast scene at a time when the burgeoning genre was growing in popularity, even if his reputation as the Clown Prince of Hip-Hop seemed to preclude any significant success.

The success of 1989’s Just A Friend proved otherwise, extensively using the 1968 R&B song You Got What I Need, although because it was re-recorded and interpolated, it managed to escape the growing legal scrutiny surrounding sound collages and sampling in the genre.

The song that ultimately got him and the entire genre of hip-hop in trouble, however, was 1991’s Alone Again, from the album I Need A Haircut.

The song extensively sampled the 1972 song Alone Again (Naturally) by singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan.

Once he found out, the record label Grand Upright Music sued Biz Markee, his record label Warner Bros. Records and his production and recording companies, in a lawsuit that features ten defendants.

All Samples To Be Cleared

The main defence was that unapproved sampling had been used as part of assemblage, sound collage and other remixing arts, and therefore could be excused as a mistake.

However, it turned out that Warner Bros. had attempted to seek permission for the sample, demonstrating that they knew that they were infringing on Grand Upright’s intellectual property, and it was ruled that their legal infraction was intentional.

Whilst the decision was criticised at the time for potential bias, with the first line of the judgement being the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not steal”, linking the unauthorised sample to burglary, it set the precedent that all samples needed to be cleared before they were used in published records.

Not only did this change Biz Markie’s career personally, with his follow-up album jokingly called All Samples Cleared, but it fundamentally changed the nature of ownership when it came to music and particularly to music with samples.

Sampling as an art form changed from using tiny parts of thousands of different sounds to buying the rights to one particular song and adding additional flourishes to make it new.

Several early hip-hop albums have not seen re-releases as a result of this verdict due to the prohibitive intellectual property costs involved.