As we saw earlier the pioneering Canadian composer,John Oswald, deals directly with the issues of copyright, appropriation, sampling in music. Copyright, which was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas, is now increasingly being used to stifle it.

A reaction to this is Oswald's 'plunderphonics', which is a form of musical collage. According to Oswald, a plunderphone is "a transformed but still recognizable audio quote." A plunderphonic composition is a specific, radical form of collage in which all materials have been appropriated from existent music. It is a politically motivated genre which is focused on the notion of free samples and challenging perceived hypocrisy of musical copyright law.

Grayfolded was an example of taking existing music and someway making it different or, ideally, making it better.

Another is "Plexure", which is completely assembled from other CDs and features over 1,000 'electroquoted' contemporary pop artists from the past decade. A myriad of sources are used---moments of Madonna, Prince, Nirvana, Edie Brickell, Deee-Lite, Julee Cruise, U2, Jane's Addiction, Metallica, Talking Heads, EMF, C+C Music Factory, Fine Young Cannibals, Annie Lennox, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This disc debuted in 1993, so much of the recording is culled from the late 1980s/early 90s.

Another project in making sound collage from existing musics is plunderphonics.The 1989 release of Plunderphonic was made at Oswald's own expense. Oswald made 1,000 copies of the not-for-sale Plunderphonic, distributed free to radio stations, libraries and others. It's cover artwork represented a naked Michael Jackson with a woman’s body. It was destroyed by the recording industry acting on the request of plundered artist Michael Jackson.

69 plunderphonics 96 contains 60 tracks, from the Swinging Sixties to the Numb Nineties that creates constellations of sonic diversity.

It consists of two hyper-dense discs. These cover the gamut of progressive musical endeavour: punk meets classical, schmaltz marries metal, jazz divorces rap and electronica kills world music.