>>4654995As far as I know, no sane court on the planet would consider spoken word vocal samples from a free, publicly available broadcast to qualify as intellectual property, especially in the case of Pop on Rocks, where the vocal sample in question was reading from a book which the narrator did not own the intellectual property of nor have permission to use.
It's actually incredibly common in the music mixing scene to use cut samples from television, from public broadcast networks, even from presidential speeches. Strictly speaking, none of these samples are owned by the mixing artist, but the original speaker also does not have the rights to them. They are not intellectual property, they're just spoken word.
Legally speaking, cover overstepped their bounds and tried to fight something that is incredibly common practice in virtually every music production scene around the world.
Imagine trying to sue someone's novel for copyright infringement because they used the word "the" and you said "the" once. It's that absurd, but the issue is that DMCA operates such that the company has unlimited power to abuse false claims to bully small creators if they so choose, and the only recourse that creator has is to genuinely take them to court over it. The DMCA makes it possible to do this despite Cover being Japanese and the artist being american, but it's a big step to take a corporation you were previously a fan of to court over trying to lay claim to something they don't own because they won't answer your emails.
