Free Screening of the film Copyright Criminals October 21, 2009

Can you own a sound? It depends who you ask. For more than thirty years, innovative hip-hop performers from Public Enemy to De La Soul have been re-using portions of previously recorded music in new and otherwise original compositions.

But when record company lawyers got involved everything changed. What was once referred to as borrowed melody became a copyright infringement. Trace the rise of hip-hop form the urban streets of New York to its current status as a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Watch a preview at http://www.copyrightcriminals.com