Court upholds Beastie Boys' sampling

The Beastie Boys have walked away from an American appeals court victorious, after a dispute over sampling.

Yesterday, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reconsider its decision last year allowing the group to use a six-second segment of music from jazz flautist James Newton's 1978 composition Choir.

A three-judge panel of the court held in 2003 that the band had abided by copyright protections by paying a license fee for a sample of Newton's recording and therefore did not have to pay an additional fee to license the underlying composition.

The finding upheld a lower-court dismissal of the case in favour of the Beastie Boys, and the 9th Circuit has refused to reconsider its ruling before a larger 11-judge panel.

The Beastie Boys used the sample in their song Pass The Mic on their 1992 album Check Your Head.