Innovators or Pirates?

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"Blaming the victim is a way of [people] maintaining belief in a just world" (Martin, Moore & Salter 2010).

This quote is a very important one I believe, as we know in most cases the victim always loses out. The argument of DJ's and hip hop artists pirating and ripping off of other peoples work came about in the mid to late 80's. A new type of music production had been created through advancements in technology called sampling.
The documentary Copyright Criminals (2009) goes through the history of sampling and how it began to define and become so controversial in hip hop music. Dj's were made out to be the victim in the 80's and were the blame of this sampling controversy. By watching the documentary though, it seems artists only started to care about the use of their own material when Hip Hop became a money making machine.
They seem split on the idea as Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler teamed up with Run DMC to produce 'Walk this Way', a record which Tyler sung on. Some artists though, as highlighted in the documentary, didn't approve of what Hip Hop was doing as they believed they were just ripping off songs. The problem with that argument though is that it's hard to find what the origin of music actually was. Inventions were built on other people's ideas and inventions, for example the car. Did the inventor of the car give a portion of profit to the person who invented the battery, door, door handle, fuel or even colour?
A remix, bootleg or mash-up are re-imaginings of songs that have been previously created and altered for a new genre or culture. When you hear a guitar riff in a song, do you think the person who created the guitar and guitar strings was paid a slice to allow the artist to create that sound? It seems hypocritical to me that lawyers be brought in to sue a DJ for a 1 bar sample taken from a song. As DJ Shock G said, "What a photographer is to the painter, is what the modern producer, DJ and computer musicians are to the instrumentalist" (Copyright Criminals, 2009).
This attempt of devaluation by suits against samplers backfired as sampling is ever present in the fastest growing production of music in the world, electronic music.

This could be of interest ----> http://soundsjustlike.com/  <---- Give it a go!

References:

Martin, B, Moore, C and Salter, C. 2010, ‘Sharing music files: tactics of a challenge to the industry’, First Monday, vol. 15, no. 12, retrieved 8 August 2013, <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2986/2680]>

Copyright Criminals 2009, video recording, Changing Images, USA