Please Hold... Your Call is Very Important to Us

Reading about the California budget woes and how it and municipal money problems are making it much harder for many fire departments to respond to ordinary calls made me think of Public Enemy and their infamous track, "911 is a Joke."

Which lead to this fun fact thanks to Wikipedia:

...if all the samples used on "911 Is a Joke" and the other tracks on Fear of a Black Planet would have been cleared for copyright under current (2010) rates, each copy of the album would have generated a loss of five dollars per album sold, instead of a profit.

So... Crime does pay? Or it did??