Of course it's not ok, Hooligan, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying everyone has the right to "steal" anything he wants to - at the very least full credit where it's due heh! - but millions of notes are sampled everyday from HH producers, live with it. Most of HH songs are made of "stolen" bases only, I can barely think of a completely original HH song from the start to the end.
Point is, the talented producer turns the sample upside down so that it sounds unrecognizable, while the famous producer's got a bunch of talented lawyers behind his ass and gives a {bleep} about who originally composed the tune. And Mr. Timbakitty is nowadays one of laziest and most unoriginal HH producers, so I'm not surprised at all.
But what if the same melody was sampled by an unknown producer and put on an album selling only 50,000 copies instead? We would be here saying "genius!" or "fscking cool! he's got an amiga!" or "oh god! this man knows the scene!" to him, wouldn't we?
