"if your rhymes aren't your own, that's a huge sin against the creative process. You don't use someone else's raps; it's very much Not Done."

An irony in "Rapper's Delight" (one of the first commercialized rap records) being a canonical example of an emcee biting another rapper's rhyme:

"Check it out, I'm the C-A-S an' the O-V-A, and the rest is F-L-Y" (rhyme originally attributed to Grandmaster Caz [shortened slang form of Casanova] being bitten by Wonder Mike of Sugarhill Gang).

Ah, I should probably add for those not hip to Hip Hop culture: to "bite" a rhyme, when it comes to emcees rappin: is to plagiarize it.

Turntablists (aka skratch deejays) typically take others' vinyl and repurpose them creatively though, so YMMV. For a longer exploration there's the documentary: Copyright Criminals.

IMHO, some of the best Hip Hop is a clever reprisal of something else.

Take for example, Immortal Technique rappin over ABBA's "Money, Money, Money" as "Rich Man's World (1%)":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaBE-Oq4y2A&list=RDyaBE-Oq4y2A&t=25s

The cynic in me thinks that covers remain popular within the music "biz" because the "powers that be" have somehow determined that it's OK to derive royalties (and thus profits) from covers in "legal" manners. Top Music Attorney has many explorations of the nuances of such things, from the legal system's perspective.

Meanwhile, more or less all the legal advice on the DVD of Copyright Criminals is null and void in 2026.

Sample clearance in the current era is a minefield. It wasn't always that way (companies making sampler hardware such as the legendary E-mu SP1200, wanted customers too after all. They presumably, still do [e.g. see the Ilsa Instruments S2400 as a more recent reprisal of sampler hardware]), but as with more or less everything where money can be involved: greedy jerks ruined things for basically everyone unless that someone/thing is an entity from which they can leech and profit.

It's excruciatingly common that some have taken the concept of "master study" and abused it to justify use of LLMs these days too. Some YouTuber had a decent rebuttal of such things, but I can't remember whom to reference specifically at the moment (and if I recall, the video was pretty long too).

Once upon a time, some folks used CliffsNotes to feign that they'd done a reading assignment in schools. These days, I am guessing LLMs spare the lazy students the "hassle" of even reading CliffsNotes?

There was some MacRumors post the other day about upcoming M5 Max/Ultra whatever MacBook refreshes, and z0mg some of the comments of people who apparently have more money than wisdom salivating about how they didn't need a new laptop, but wanted to see if it could run local LLMs faster? Sickening.

Such trends aren't new, and there are associated attitudes on many sides.

While I was an undergrad in University, I remember one of my professors (Norika Aso) at UC Santa Cruz being seemingly taken aback by The Matrix "I know kung fu" line. I'm paraphrasing, poorly, but essentially she perceived it as if the Wachowskis had just hand waved away with a download, the entire master/student trope. Which, if you watch wǔxiá flicks, is kind of an awesome trope.

Anyway, we still seem to have new wǔxiá explorations with master/student montages! Meanwhile, The Matrix franchise seems to have gotten worse with each subsequent installment, maybe there's a lesson in that too?

Theatrically, in a different capacity, the 2025 movie The Choral sort of explores a creative reinterpretation of a work, but in that instance, there is a portrayal of the supposed author of the work, coming to greet the performers (though he's too busy to stay to witness their performance) and well, I don't want to spoil it, but it does not go as planned.

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