ironically enough, the dandy warhols, who cop the riff for brown sugar, get ripped off by Turbonegro, though the song escapes me

what about good ole Vanilla Ice using that sample from Queen's under pressure.
he went on record saying it wasn't a sample when it obviously was.

some rip-offs actually credit the actual composer, eg :

robbie william's "supreme" took the instrumental bridege from "i will survive"
indeed the whole song's structure is ripped from it, but i like it

did Vanilla Ice credit Queen in their "ice ice baby" ? I dunno

a great Pet shop boys album track "It couldn't happen here" the chorus is ripped from an obscure Morricone soundtrack, but they credited him, good job.

my point bout Lennon and Tim Rice/Webber, is that even as famous stars, they would still unconciously "rip" off other people

Vanilla Ice went as far as to deny the fact that he had any influence by anyone. He repeatedly attempted to justify his point that his beat was somehow different than any of the beats he stole because his rhythm displaced notes in certain places, making a sixteenth or thirty-second beat different intervals. Basically, a completely rediculous claim, but it was an attempt to stay away from being sued.

Some people do rip off without knowing it. I used to be in a pop band, and they made a ballade (stupid band it was).
I said alright play it...what I then heard was "angie". I couldn't resist to sing it either. They were mad, 'cause I destroyed their song, but I was mad, because they ripped it. Even though they didn't really knew, that they ripped it. losers!!

You know, I can actually understand how that happens. A tune gets stuck in your head, and you end up thinking "Boy that sounds good". When you lay out the music, and someone says "Hey! I knwo that tune...", it's not because you suck... you just worked on the principle that you had something original. When someone points it out, that's when you step back and say "Oh yeah, they are the same, look at that..."

If you're not man/woman enough to admit using someone else's music, then you need to stop making music altogether...

that's true, still they were losers
I'm ripping off music all the time. I mean I make my own jazzcovers, ha. Well I'm not really ripping them off...When I'm more trained, I'll make my own jazzy songs.

Yeah, I heard Vanilla Ice talkin' about that Ice Ice Baby song, and he's an obvious liar. I remember he was looking down alot, a true sign that someone is lying.
The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony was a good song, and it's a shame that the Rolling Stones took all their money. Don't they have enough? Since they started out playing other people's shit, they should look at it like it's a tribute or somethin'. To take all their money shows that they're a bunch of greedy sell-outs, oh wait, I already figured that out when I saw them playing under a huge beer banner. Lawyers suck.

Moby rips off people. He uses samples from all over the place and doesn't give them any recognition what so ever. What's worse is the people he rips off don't have any money.

Actually, there's quite a large gap between Moby and Vanilla Ice, let's say. Moby doesn't claim people's work as his own - he samples, remixes, and makes his own style. DJs around the world do this all the time, and make money from it. Vanilla Ice, on the other hand, takes other people's music, calls it his own, defends his stolen music as his own intellectual work, and thinks he should make money off of someone else's time.

Sure, they both profit off something they didn't necessarily pull together themselves. But in Moby's defense, most of what he produces that's been sampled is never usually the same thing that was produced from the original artist. Its what remixes are all about - it is, in fact, what I've been doing for the past 8 months now or so. And truly, if I ever profit off this at all, so be it...

Oh, and just as an aside, check the inside covers of some of Moby's albums... there are tons of recognitions in there, even though by any law governing music, and remixing said music, he doesn't have to give a spit and a swallow to the original artists. There's a difference between appreciating someone else's work and using it to make something new, and stealing it and calling it your own original stuff.