I found the documentary on Girl Talk to be extremely interesting, because it raised a lot of good questions from both sides of the argument on the legality of mash-ups. On one hand, I feel bad for artists like Girl Talk, who are obviously doing something fresh and innovative, but on the other, I can understand why people have a problem with his unusual methods.
I think what Girl Talk critics have the biggest issue with is his use of the actual recordings themselves, even though they are just chords played by instruments when broken down to their core. As seen in the documentary, artists across generations have used chord progressions and beats similar to songs of the past. If Girl Talk was using his own instrumentation but the same chords as the songs he's sampling, it's doubtful his critics would still be complaining about his music.
For Girl Talk's side of the argument, he claims that songs are "fair use" and that he has the right to use portions of them in his music. He spends hours turning clips of songs into his own creation, so he has the right to defend his art, but their is something unmistakably iffy about his right to use the songs without the artist's permission. I believe there should be a legal amount of a song mash-up artists can use without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on to get official permission from record labels. I feel like a lot of artists would be okay with this, because given from what we saw in the video, it was actually the labels who cried foul.
After some consideration, I take Girl Talk's side on this issue, mostly because of the idea of "transformative use." This concept claims that a "derivative work is transformative if it uses a source work in a completely new or unexpected way", and I think it's safe to say that Girl Talk's music is completely new and unexpected. He edits and splices songs together in a way that they bear no resemblance to their original forms, so to my ears, his songs are completely original. At the end of the day, Girl Talk is an artist too, and deserves the right to create like one too.
