Speaking of Timberlake, that brings us inevitably to Timbaland. After the fawning over Rick Rubin in the New York Times, it's amazing that there hasn't been a similarly high-profile profile of the best producer working in pop music today.
Until then, this piece from The Wire should do nicely, even though it's nine (!) years old. The article comes courtesy of Sasha-Frere Jones, both for blogging its reappearance online and for writing it in the first place.
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Timbaland isn't too popular in the demoscene, where he's accused of ripping off a piece by an unsigned artist and using it for a ringtone and then as part of a Nelly Furtado song (without paying royalties).
http://www.google.com/search?q=timbaland+demo+scene
http://scamwagon.blogspot.com/2007/02/timbaland-rips-off-demoscene-artist.html
Yeah, I've seen the issue... Tim clearly wasn't right in taking the song wholesale as a sample, but there's a process for getting paid for samples that aren't cleared, and I think the guys who made the demo should go for it. Honestly, I can see the song *seeming* to be public domain by the time it works its way from the demo scene to whomever found it somewhere online to whomever passed it to Timbaland.
I'm not justifying the lack of clearance, but I do think its entirely possible by the time a track like that gets into the hands of a top-level record producer, its provenance could well have been completely lost. Timbaland's made more than enough beats on his own that he certainly don't *need* to rip off samples. He should have done the right thing and just said "I didn't realize this was someone's recent creation and I'll try to get him credit" and the demo makers should have just contacted the record company and said "we were sampled on this record but the sample was never cleared".
"He should have done the right thing and just said "I didn't realize this was someone's recent creation and I'll try to get him credit"..."
Being a big Tim fan myself for a long time, this is exactly what irks me about this issue. Here's what he said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTvY3wZrHrQ
There are times when it's OK to be arrogant; this wasn't one of them.
(By the way, posting this comment was quite an adventure: http://flickr.com/photos/misled/1341241223/)