Timbaland, Nine Years On

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".