The above is Gregg Michael Gillis doing his thing under the stage name Girl Talk. So what is his "thing"? By day Gregg is a biomedical engineer, but by night Gregg is a disc jockey that specializes in the mashups the crowd of people behind him in this picture are going crazy for. He has also released several albums under this name.
But even more than just mashups, Gregg Gillis's "thing" is music sampling. He produces no original melodies on guitars or pianos, but he samples songs from other artists and makes new songs from them. This puts Gregg in a tight spot with Copyright Law. Technically the music that Gregg is sampling is the intellectual property of these other artists, and some would call his sampling stealing.
So what keeps Gregg from being sued under Copyright Law for stealing intellectual property? It is this idea of making new songs from existing ones. It is Gregg's claim that he has "Fair Use" of the samples because the nature of the use is transformative. Specifically under Section 107 of Copyright Law, something is considered a fair use of intellectual property if it transforms the material enough to change the context and essentially become something completely new. So Girl Talk ultimately steers clear of Copyright infringement by taking already existing songs and transforming them into completely new songs. As long as the purpose of his music sampling is transformative and to generate altogether new content, Gregg can continue to do his thing and be Girl Talk.
Photo:
http://www.sunfest.com/blog/words-girl-talk
