Jazz is illegal.  Probably. Isn't that a shame? Well, at least if the soloist does not pay a licensing fee to the composer of the tune he just quoted in that eight-bar solo. And as for basing an entire song on  the famous chord progressions taken from Gershwin's I Got Rhythm – something hundreds of jazz greats have done? Forget about it.

Rap is illegal too – at least the interesting rap of the 1980s that sampled hundreds or thousands of other tracks to produce a wall of sound.  The boringly simplistic thudding rap of today is fine – the two or three samples in each song have been cleared through an army of lawyers. The great classical composers?  Well, it is a good thing they are not alive today. All those witty quotations, homages? All verboten. “Get a licence or do not quote, Ludwig!”  As for a composer like Charles Ives, who scholars claim practised 14 different forms of “borrowing” in building his paean to the American musical spirit?  Nowadays he would be advised to hire a good lawyer. Under contemporary law in the US,13 of them are illegal.