I can see it would be a bit tricky of you're not a native English speaker.

The first case was this: A famous group of producers freely admitted they loved a song done by Marvin Gaye and wrote a new song similar to it. It had different words and a different bass line but the overall feel and sound was very similar. When Gaye's family heard it they sued saying it was too close to what Marvin did and the court agreed it was copyright infringement. That was a big bomb dropped in the middle of the music biz because everybody thought the feel or rhythm or whatever was ok, it was specific musical licks or melodies they had to watch out for. I listened to both songs and yes they definitely have a certain ambience or overall feel in common even though the new one has different words. This case was not about specific samples it was about the feel of it.

His second point was where do you draw the line with copying samples? If you sample the bass line from Thriller and you can clearly hear it's the bass line from Thriller then forget it, you'll get sued. What he did was sample some parts of Uptown Funk but using Abelton Live he transformed the samples so much they had no resemblance at all to the original sound. He then posed the question, is this OK or not? His answer was "maybe".

These two cases have nothing specific to do with rap or hip hop, it concerns all music. He's talking about soundtracks from big movies like Star Wars or the Avengers, pop songs, classic country, whatever. And, he specifically said if you copy or sample something that is recognizable and release it you WILL get caught so don't even think about it. He even answered the question, how about just one bar? NO. How about just 2 beats? NO. If a third party listening to an original recording of yours can tell even one little thing was exactly the same as the original, you're screwed if the artist wants to sue. There is software now that can pick stuff like that up just like the software universities use to catch students trying to cheat on their term papers by plagiarizing books or other published papers.

Bob

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