Music copyright from the ‘90s to now: “Ice Ice Baby” and artificial intelligence

By Tara Wasik

After its release in 1981, “Under Pressure” immediately became a sensational hit, giving British artists Queen and David Bowie a top spot on the UK Singles Chart. Even today, the snazzy bassline evokes recognition and excitement. However, hearing that familiar bassline may elicit memories of another hit single: Vanilla Ice’s debut song, “Ice Ice Baby,” released in 1990. 

The two basslines are exactly the same with one key difference–an added eighth note in “Ice Ice Baby”. In a now notoriously popular defense, Vanilla Ice asserts that the basslines are “not the same,” but Queen and Bowie strongly disagreed. Vanilla Ice later retracted that statement and claimed humorous intentions. The damage was done, and his response lives in infamy.

United States copyright protection subsists “in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” Among the forms of protected material are “musical works, including any accompanying words,” and “sound recordings.”

Only the owner of a copyrighted work has the exclusive rights to “prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work,” along with other actions like reproduction, distribution, performance, and transferring ownership.

On the other hand, copyright protections are limited in favor of fair use, when works are used “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” These are not infringements of copyright law.

Copyright law becomes increasingly complicated when music sampling becomes a factor. Sampling, the process of incorporating material from another track into a new track, is incredibly common. This technique often uses chopping, looping, and other forms of distortion to acquire a desired effect. When hip-hop emerged as a dominant genre in the 1980s, sampling beats became routine. Vanilla Ice speaks to the prevalence of sampling: “Rap music is sampling. Every major rap artist in the world samples music.” Copyright laws took a while to catch up with this trend, with “Ice Ice Baby” serving as a landmark case.

With the world watching this unprecedented situation unfold, Bowie and Queen threatened to take Vanilla Ice to court. Eventually, Vanilla Ice was able to avoid a copyright infringement suit by giving credit to the original writers and publishers of “Under Pressure” for “Ice Ice Baby” and paying the two artists an amount that was undisclosed at the time. Years later, Vanilla Ice himself shared that he paid four million dollars to acquire the publishing rights for “Under Pressure,” claiming that it would save more money than continuing to pay royalties.

In a 1990 interview, Vanilla Ice expresses his thoughts on why his record became such a point of contention regarding copyright: “The reason why you don’t hear as much controversy going on with other rap groups sampling stuff is because a good rap record in the United States just goes Gold.” He says Platinum “is a lot for rap. And I sold five Platinum.” Less popular tracks have a better chance of flying under the radar. Now over thirty years from David Bowie and Queen threatening to sue Vanilla Ice, copyright infringement cases are significantly more common.

From 2022 to 2023, the global music copyright market experienced an 11% growth reaching 45.5 billion dollars. Collective Management Organizations (CMOs), groups that collect royalties on behalf of writers and publishers, also received a similar increase in revenues. Moreover, the music copyright market is thriving, especially due to the complicated rise of artificial intelligence (AI), prompting the upturn in copyright infringement cases.

“Heart on My Sleeve”, an AI song generated to mimic Drake and The Weeknd, was all the rage online when it was released in 2023. Tik Tok user Ghostwriter977 trained AI on Drake and The Weeknd’s works, generating this eerily similar track. Universal Music Group, the label owner of Drake and The Weeknd, invoked copyright violations to remove the song from  internet platforms.

Intellectual property expert, Louis Tompros, outlines the two major issues that materialize when AI gets involved with music: “who, if anyone, owns the copyright to material that is in whole or in part generated by artificial intelligence” and “what rights do human copyright owners have when AI creates something?”

The United States Copyright Office stipulates that “copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity.” The term “author,” used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans. Each case that uses AI-generated material should be assessed on a case-by-case basis to determine if the evidence was produced through an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form” or by “mechanical reproduction.” How the AI tool operates and which individuals train such tools will chiefly determine these results. So far, it is safe to say that there are no definite guidelines for music copyright that incorporate aspects of AI. 

Following the emergence of hip-hop sampling, new unaccustomed developments and a lack of precedent led to a wave of landmark copyright decisions. Besides Vanilla Ice, De La Soul v. The Turtles (1991) similarly ended with a settlement outside of court and a warning for rap artists and labels to tread carefully. Hip-hop group De La Soul heavily sampled for their album 3 Feet High and Rising, using a 12-second segment from The Turtles’ 1969 song “You Showed Me.” At a time when sampling was new and “relatively lawless,” former Turtles band member Mark Volman expressed that “sampling is just a longer term for theft.” Modern mainstream albums would presumably not be able to get away with the amount of sampling De La Soul did.

Blatant substantial sampling without permission or credit has become frowned upon. Presently, further ways to narrow the scope and allowed occurrences of sampling were established which echoed the legal trends from ‘90s rap sampling when copyright infringement became stricter. In 2014, Robin Thicke v. Marvin Gaye became a tabloid sensation as the family of late Motown singer Marvin Gaye alleged that pop singer Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” stole content from Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Although the sheet music for both were not that similar, external studio arrangements—such as bass lines, background noise, and cowbell use—culminated in a successful lawsuit for Gaye’s family. This unexpectedly narrow decision has elicited fears from artists and legal experts on this potentially restrictive precedent that could drastically change the game of plagiarism and copyright infringement.

Immediately following this decision, Mark Ronson v. The Gap Band, the Sequence, Zapp and Collage surfaced. In a nutshell, the debate was between “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson (feat. Bruno Mars) (2014) and “Oops Upside Your Head” by The Gap Band (1979), “Funk You Up” by The Sequence (1979), “More Bounce to the Ounce” by Zapp (1980), and “Young Girls” by Collage (1983).

Ronson and Mars legally admitted that “Uptown Funk” sounded like these songs. Legal experts correlate this event with the decision made from Thicke, and the threshold of similarity for publishers to include songwriting credits is lowering.

With the emergence of AI, the music copyright field will foreseeably mirror this route of frequent precedent setting, but with one exception: vast amounts of new legislation are also bound to materialize. For instance, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024 was introduced in April of that year. This bill requires a “notice to be submitted to the Register of Copyrights with respect to copyrighted works used in building generative AI systems.” Although the bill died, its provisions could become law if it is included in another bill.

Additionally, the Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks (TRAIN) Act was designed to allow creators, from musicians to other artists, to determine if their works were used in the training of artificial intelligence models. The TRAIN Act was introduced in November 2024, and even though it also did not pass, legislators will continue to introduce bills of this nature alongside the unfolding of an abundance of court decisions. 

American law adapts and accommodates itself through time, and copyright is no exception. From the 1990s to the present, the music copyright field has been adjusted to accommodate sampling. Cases have gotten stricter and stricter with their similarity requirements, and AI has and will certainly further this quandary.