
Right: the IPKat's own take on sampling and "Feed the Animals"
Gillis doesn’t seek copyright clearance since he argues that United States copyright law entitles him to do so under its fair use doctrine (and perhaps, suggests the NYT, because it would be prohibitively expensive to do so ...)
According to the article, the DJ's music is pulled from more sources than most hip-hop hits, which often use a loop of music taken from a single song. Where Gillis is different from many others is that he does not radically reconfigure songs or search out obscure samples. Instead he mixes clips of contemporary hip-hop artists and classic rock riffs from groups like Aerosmith, Cheap Trick and AC/DC. The article then goes on to discuss both the content of his works and the US copyright perspectives on it, observing that, while he has not yet been sued, he is getting the cold shoulder from some sections of the industry itself.

Right: DJ Girl Talk and a sample of his adherents
Merpel says, you can't have it both ways: either it's an infringement of another's rights or it isn't -- however creative it may be in its own right -- and a "right-to-use-plus-a-duty-to-pay" solution, which could be made to work well in practice, doesn't exactly have the historical pedigree of the Berne Convention to underwrite it. Having said that, there is a good case for saying that, while Berne, Protection, Collective Licensing and Royalties governed copyright attitudes in the 20th century, Burn, Share, Sample and Free Access govern copyright attitudes in the 21st.