Notre Dame Law Review Volume 93 | Issue 4 Article 12 3-2018 Rejecting the De Minimis Defense to Infringement of Sound Recording Copyrights Michael G. Kubik University of Notre Dame Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr Part of the Entertainment, Arts, and Sports Law Commons, and the Intellectual Property Law Commons Recommended Citation Michael G. Kubik, Rejecting the De Minimis Defense to Infringement of Sound Recording Copyrights, 93 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1699 (2018). Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol93/iss4/12 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by the Notre Dame Law Review at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Notre Dame Law Review by an authorized editor of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. \\jciprod01\productn\N\NDL\93-4\NDL412.txt unknown Seq: 1 31-MAY-18 11:29 NOTES REJECTING THE DE MINIMIS DEFENSE TO INFRINGEMENT OF SOUND RECORDING COPYRIGHTS Michael G. Kubik* INTRODUCTION “Get a license or do not sample.”1 The Sixth Circuit’s terse ultimatum in the 2005 Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films decision rejected the com- mon law de minimis2 exception to copying as applied to sound recordings, and for eleven years, Bridgeport stood unchallenged by the courts of appeals, the Supreme Court, and Congress.3 This changed in June 2016 with the Ninth Circuit’s decision in VMG Salsoul, LLC v. Ciccone.4 Confronted with the question of whether the de minimis defense applies to the unauthorized copying of sound recordings, the court openly rejected the Sixth Circuit’s reasoning and held that the de minimis defense applies.5 In doing so, the Ninth Circuit created a circuit split subjecting two centers of the American music industry, Nashville (Sixth Circuit) and Los Angeles (Ninth Circuit), to * Candidate for Juris Doctor, Notre Dame Law School, 2019; Bachelor of Arts, Honors in Philosophy, University of Michigan, 2016.