So, about half an hour ago or so I was in my kitchen making a sallad. It’s midsummers-eve here in Sweden, and while I’m not partaking in any festivities I felt that something a little more festive was called for as far as dinner was concerned. Thus, I made chicken-salad. Quite lovely.
While pretending to know what the hell I was doing in the kitchen, I had some music on for companionship. One of my favorite songs is “God is a DJ” by Faithless. It’s a great dance-type song, and I never tire of listening to it.
This time however I noticed an interesting sound in the song. Faithless often uses odd bleeps, sweeps and loops in their songs, and this one sounded familiar. I’d probably noticed it before, but this time I paid attention to it. While my hands chopped various vegetables my mind stirred around and tried to remember where I’d heard that particular sound before.
After some mental wandering through my archives I remembered. It was from one of my all-time favorite movies, the masterpiece known as “Apocalypse Now“.
Apocalypse Now has a very interesting soundscape. The music is this odd synthesizer-and-percussion thing, and most of the soundscape is somewhat surreal and unreal – which goes well with the films somewhat bisarre themes. One of the more noticeable aspects of this is that a lot of the helicopter sounds have been replaced with similar-sounding (yet at the same time kind of alien) synthesizer-created sounds.
The very first minutes of the film demonstrates this, with the Huey swooping across the film with a distinctly non-Huey type sound.
It was this very sound I heard in “God is a DJ”. An odd, swooping type sound filling out the background.
I briefly wondered if Faithless had sampled it from the movie, and if so whether it was a legitimate (i.e. they asked for permission from the copyright holders) or whether it was a black-market sample. The latter option seemed much more logical, and while it’s a fairly uniquie soundbite it’s also quite generic to the untrained ear.
But then my mind continued thinking about this. What if they’d recreated the sound using the same type of equipment? What if Faithless discovered they could replicate the sound using completely different equipment?
So who owns the sound if an almost identical sound can be recreated using completely different equipment some twenty years after the “original” sound was created?
Could the copyright holders of Apocalypse decide that they owned the IP of that particular sound, and that any other sound created independently of that sound, sounds that weren’t completely identical but at the same time sounded similar enough, was in fact infringing on their intellectual property? That they owned the rights to every similar sound?
Of course it’s quite bizarre to think about, but it’s also essentially how the copyright-mafia works today so it wouldn’t really surprise me either if some crazed hollywood rights-holder unleashed a shitload of lawyers over this trivial matter.
Which in the long run reminds me that this IP-hostility only serves to stifle creativity. If Faithless had to leave out that sound due to threats of being sued into oblivion, then the rights-holder of that sound would’ve stifled innovation and creativity.
Kind of sad to think about.
(The sound in question can be heard here, in this Youtube-video of the very introduction from Apocalypse Now. It’s the very first sound heard, the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh.)
