Terry Fisher runs a panel.

Bill Alford wrote a book about the Chinese views of “intellectual property,” called To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense. He says that the Chinese have a sense of the past as a living, shared context. One makes one’s mark not by breaking from the past (as our Romantic geniuses do) but by making it one’s own. “Copying doesn’t carry the same dark implications as in the West.”

Unfortunately, I missed most of what Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club, had to say. When I came in, he was speaking charmingly about noticing that his book had been slapped with a “all similarities to people living or dead is purely coincidental.” In his book, the similarities aren’t coincidental at all. His publisher allowed him to re-write it since he’s a grad of Harvard Law.

Lawrence Ferrara is chairman of the dept. of music and performing arts at NYU, as well as a pianist. He explains the law around basing one musical work on another. [There is no chance I would represent his views accurately, so I’m not going to try.] He thinks that even tiny samples should be paid for, although he says he’d like to see some “common sense” applied so that “minimal” samples don’t have to be paid for; but he thinks that a three note arpeggio, even if digitally transformed, isn’t minimal enough [I think]. It can be hard to determine that something is a sample in the final recording but, he says, when you get the ProTool file, you can tell precisely. [Remixers take heed.]

Q: Is there any point at which a sample is so altered that it no longer is the same sample?

Lawrence: It probably wouldn’t be picked up. But if it were, the record companies would want it to be licensed.

[Lawrence’s disquisition is learned and subtle. But is the world better if his regime continues to win?]

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