Entire genres were spawned from the act of sampling. Personally, I think that if you can take a sample and, like Conan said, use it as a building block and alter it to fit your needs to create something that people like, then you've done your job as an artist.
Legally, there are rules about sampling, but when you see big artists sampling stuff that's extremely obvious, they usually obtain the rights for it. But hey, you can sample anything you want and process it to the point where even the owner of the original track wouldn't recognize it.
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