> And, to me, creating bones of a character seems a lot like extracting individual hits of a beat.

I agree.

> (Let's assume that you own the copyright to the underlying recording in the ReCycle situation, so as to avoid a discussion of the legal implications of sampling music.)

And this assumption isn't valid, and it's precisely where the complexity comes in. The tool doesn't just create bones. It has a bunch of rather nice gaits which presumably a human artist designed to be nice to look at:

- 8 dancing movements

- 8 funny movements

- 7 jumping movements

- 9 walking movements

I think those are analogous to the samples you're using in your example. If the sample is a generic recording of a piano, that's one thing. If it's Justin Bieber saying "Stay," that's another thing.