Fair Use, Copyright and Girl Talk

Girl Talk is a mash up musician and DJ who creates his music by taking samples of pre-existing songs and mashing them together. This could clash with pre-existing laws that protect copyright, or as many call it, the intellectual property of others. The biggest controversy surrounding him is whether or not if Girl Talk's music is breaking copyright laws, or if he is protected by Fair Use and transformative use.

Copyright laws are in place to protect the intellectual property of something. That means for a period of time the image, song, text, and other content cannot be used without consent of the owner (note this may or may not be the original creator). You cannot just paint Mickey Mouse on something as that is technically illegal. These laws are supposed to stop financial losses from To counteract this, the fair use and transformative use principles are often applied to make sure people are not wrongfully punished.

Fair use states that use of copyright material can be used if for educational purposes, parody, or criticize. This also has to apply the transformative use, which means that if kept under a certain amount of editing, the material may not be seen as the original copyrighted content.

With Girl Talk, the issue is he does not apply the fair use principle at all. His work is not meant to be anything substantial beyond entertainment purposes. This leaves him to solely rely on transformative use to escape copyright infringement. Girl Talk takes samples of music, mostly small one to two second snippets of songs and create music out of this. 

Overall, Girl Talk escapes punishment because he abides by the transformative use principle. While he still profits immensely off of the work of others (in that he takes samples, the songs he create a largely of his own imagination), he can get away with it because the snippets are far too small to hurt the owner of the copyright material, and he alters the samples in a different way.