"Old Town Road" is a useful modern reference for what we could have in a world without Copyright. That sample behind everything is from 34 Ghosts IV, one of the tracks in Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album.
Strictly just pasting it into a song and selling it wasn't legal (presumably after this went viral somebody paid Trent Reznor a bunch of money and put his name in the metadata to avoid nasty legal consequences) but everything up until selling it was legal, all the raw PCM data you'd want to take the samples apart without painfully cutting it out of the entire Ghosts recording was uploaded with the Ghosts I-IV album as CC-NC-BY. This is how our culture was _supposed_ to work if we weren't still trying to find ways to put more money in The Man's pocket.
Wait are you using the “Can I Kick It” analogy to argue in favor or against greed stopping art?
Because that example is a really weird grey area. The label didn’t clear one of the most obvious samples of all time. The original artist did not prevent them from releasing the derived work, but Tribe didn’t get paid for one of their classics.
Honestly I'm rather against needing to clear samples at all. I think the art should come before any concern that it would put someone into debt via a lawsuit—it should never result in making no money off it when the value is clearly in the product of the sample + performance.
Strictly just pasting it into a song and selling it wasn't legal (presumably after this went viral somebody paid Trent Reznor a bunch of money and put his name in the metadata to avoid nasty legal consequences) but everything up until selling it was legal, all the raw PCM data you'd want to take the samples apart without painfully cutting it out of the entire Ghosts recording was uploaded with the Ghosts I-IV album as CC-NC-BY. This is how our culture was _supposed_ to work if we weren't still trying to find ways to put more money in The Man's pocket.