The FL Studio community was rocked earlier this month as producer Deadmau5 claimed the use of his samples was “stealing,” even though these samples were bundled with the software and assumed by most to be licensed royalty-free. FL Studio developer Image-Line has not responded to a CDM request for comment, but they did talk to MusicRadar.com. Managing Director Jean-Marie Cannie told that site:

We’ll remove all melodic loops from FL Studio to avoid this kind of stuff in the future but that won’t change a lot I’m afraid. Our demo material has been stolen 1000s of times in the more than 10 years we have been doing this. The difference here is that this time it was stolen from a user that made it big.

I’m going to ignore for a moment the question of how “that won’t change a lot” – people will be able to steal demo content even when it’s not there? That aside, there are two odd things about this story:

1. Image-Line seems to helped create the problem by shipping sample content in software without being clear which license covered that content and which is which, then responded with the inexplicable argument that that sample content was supposed to be for “demo” purposes only (with nothing that I can see to back up that statement, and evidence that precisely the opposite was the case). No one is angry enough to dump FL, because it’s an excellent tool, but I sure hope Image-Line learns from the experience.

2. Many users are nonetheless responding “good riddance” to the loss of sample content.” For a lot of people, the bigger question here really is artistic, and maybe it’s time for computer musicians to draw a line.

Who’s sampling what? When is sampling stealing? Who’s stolen sampled samples, and was the sampling stolen stealing? Is anyone actually playing live? Does anyone know what the law is? Does anyone care?

Yes, it’s been a lively November so far for massive, complicated legal battles, PR battles, who-said-who-sampled-what battles, and general sampling messiness. Here’s a quick round-up for those of you who haven’t been able to keep up (understandably).

And we’re going to play a game. I’m going to start talking, and you can see at what point your head starts to spin and you need to go lie down.

Ready?

Here’s the executive summary:

• Justice steal samples and talk about it, because you can’t recognize them.
• US courts said long ago “nowhere to run, nowhere to hide,” to the dismay of even the RIAA.
• German courts, disagreeing with the US and with other German courts, say it don’t mean a thing if you can’t hum along.
• FL Studio turns “Faxing Berlin” Deadmau5 demo content into “Berlin” mostly-the-same demo content and a bunch of people start screaming obscenities at each other and most of us lose interest.
• Justice can’t keep their USB cables from falling out, may have to pirate samples of themselves.
• The Killers (or MTV, more to the point) plagiarize an entire stage.
• My head hurts already.