The use of samples is a staple of many genres of music. With the advent of sampling technology in the 1980s,

During a keynote speech I was giving in New York in 2008, I spent some time addressing the topic of illegal peer-to-peer sharing of music files and a particular incident that occurred at a university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It is true that in this digital age our works are technically copyrighted upon creation.   This leads us to our first question:

Why copyright your works? 

“Every person who writes a document published on the internet, who creates a graphic or icon, who scans his own photograph or records his own voice into a digital file, who sends an electronic mail message, who creates a document for a newsgroup, or who designs a web page owns the copyright to his creative work.”

- Carol Simpson, “Copyright for Schools”