Sigh. 15 years after Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, apparently word still hasn’t gotten around that sampling isn’t plagiarism. It’s way different. Kanye West is no more a thief than T.S. Eliot.
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The whole purpose of prohibitions (legal and societal) against plagiarism is to prevent artists from taking work that isn’t theirs and passing it off as their own. For reasons I’ll never really understand, critics like Keller always emphasize the act of using someone else’s work without taking into account the second part of the equation, which is really what separates plagiarism from artistic recycling.
(The law, of course, views these things somewhat differently–there’s a fair amount of interesting case law about how much of a recording you can use, under which instances you can and can’t use someone else’s melody, and so forth. Which is fair enough: the law has to be a lot less fickle than art. Not to mention that one’s economic obligation to sources is a different thing entirely from one’s intellectual obligation.)
