Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (92-1292), 510 U.S. 569 (1994)

The rap group 2 Live Crew used a sample of Roy Orbison and William Dees' "Oh, Pretty Woman" for their track, "Pretty Woman", on their album As Clean As They Wanna Be without Orbison's permission. This led to a copyright infringement case being filed by Orbison and a ruling by the Supreme Court which has great implications for both rap and music as a whole. 2 Live Crew's defense was that their song was a parody, and as such should be seen as fair use since a parody must borrow heavily from the original artwork in order to spoof it.

The court went through the 4 factors that typically determine fair use as outlined by the Copyright Act of 1976. On the first factor (The purpose and character of the use) the court determined that since 2 Live Crew's version of the song was fairly transformative, this outweighed the commercialism that would rule against fair use. As for the second factor (the nature of the copyrighted work), the Supreme Court decided that because the song is a parody, it intrinsically borrows heavily from a public, copyrighted work, and thus does not put too much weight on this factor for determining fair use. The third factor, (the amount and substantiality of the portion of the original work used), the court decided that as a parody, it was necessary for 2 Live Crew to borrow the "heart" of the work, however they differentiated their song enough from Orbison's by changing the lyrics heavily. For the fourth factor, (the effect of the use upon the market (or potential market) for the original work), they determined that it is unlikely for this work to substitute the original, and thus would not harm Sony's market.

This case is very important to music because it was one of the earliest to set down guidelines as for sampling in music, though it was a parody. Also, at this point, these types of cases were rare for courts to see, so the legislation for ruling on them was ill-defined. It was determined that parodies can not be automatically determined by an aggregate set of laws and must be tried on a case to case basis. Since rap music often samples in ways like 2 Live Crew did, this ruling essentially let the reigns free for other artists to sample music by diminishing their fears of it not being fair use. However, this is a parody and majority of rap songs are not, meaning that they are given less leeway when it comes to fair use.

In this case, the Supreme Court rules 2 Live Crew’s commercial parody of a Roy Orbison song is protected under the auspices of fair use.  The court found the new song to be significantly transformative, both building upon the earlier work as a new entity and sufficiently parodying the original in a way that was ruled as fair use.  The court also found a portion of Section 107, “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation the copyrighted work as a whole” to be a key factor, deciding that the small amount of the song actually used was significantly small enough, even if that portion displayed the heart of the work.  “Even if 2 Live Crew's copying of the original's first line of lyrics and characteristic opening bass riff may be said to go to the original's 'heart,' that heart is what most readily conjures up the song for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim.”

    I reference this case in relation to my project because this case deals with two important factors: parody, and what is said to be the “heart of the work.”  My project will be clearly defined as parody, while at the same time drawing from key thematic elements of the original works, which creates the potential for the project to be deemed as taking the heart of the work.

    This is also an issue as the audio track of my project will be a continuous copyrighted work, taking the original in its entirety and transforming it to a new medium of video.