True, Jim Lad. "Borrowing" is OK, "taking" is not.

But that applies to melody or lyrics, which I don't think is what you meant. If you use someone else's work and claim it as yours, that's theft.

I tend to the view that you can't copyright a phrase - words or music. Extracting and recombining (in modern parlance - sampling) is part of the development of new works, and has been going on for centuries in both folk and classical music, and also in other "art" writing.

Phil