This project explores the complex, and at times, troubled relationship between copyright and law hip-hop. While many factors, both positive and negative, have come to shape hip-hop as we know it today, there is one force that holds immense power over the nature and culture of Hip-Hop; one that occurs high in the offices of record labels, in contracts, and in the courtroom. This force is the law; more specifically copyright law. The aim of this project is to address how copyright law comes to grasp hip-hop, and not only question the effectiveness of the law, but explore potential changes to the law that respects the cultural and artistic integrity of hip-hop. Viewing the artistic nature of hip-hop shows how the culture heavily relies on the influence of what came before it, and the borrowing of ideas, sounds, and styles both new and old. Looking back to the era of the Disk Jockey, to the process of sampling in the present, we can see how hip-hop acts in the context of borrowing, sharing, and influencing. In this regard, we see hip-hop as a continuum; something that builds off of what has come before it demanding that it cannot be viewed in isolation. Copyright law exists not only to protect one's work but to promote the progress of useful and creative arts. The task of balancing these two ideas falls on the shoulders of the courts. Given the nature of hip-hop as a culture in which utilizing the work of others is so prominent, I argue that the courts should hold the ideas of artistic expression and transformative works with equal or more weight than the notions of ownership and copyrighted works.