The RAM of Helsinki District Court

Today the Helsinki court made their decision public in the case between GRG and Timbaland. (GRG made a cover of an Amiga-song by Tempest, and the cover was then sampl.. eh, i mean.. used as inspiration by Timbaland in a song for Nelly Furtado, and so on)

GRG and his crew were making three claims: sampling, performance rights, producer rights. The court did however only consider one of these: the performance rights. According to them GRG’s cover was not unique enough to grant him any kind of authorship rights, so the case was basically lost. This meant that they didn’t have to consider whether the song was sampled or not. Maybe they are just not very good at remembering, since this was sort of the main deal with the case to start with. They are probably very stressed from work. More RAM for the courts!

I got this information from Chris Abbott, who was the expert witness in the court, and as he put it: “So, now it’s back to the court of appeal to get it straightened out, since this is an obvious legal error. So, nothing to see here, nothing to see…”

                Hero by Trixs (ZX Spectrum 2007)

Happy New 1992

Today I updated the timeline with records from the early 1990s, specifically with the Dutch hip hoppers Osdorp Posse. In 1992 they released a CD with beats made in Protracker on Amiga. It doesn’t sound like chip music at all, but it’s tracked music with 8-bit samples played by the internal sound chip. (ie, this is media-relevant but not form-relevant) They added a Sound Canvas to their setup in 1995 and switched software to OctaMED.

So currently 1992 is the first year with a record release using chip music technology (not counting the art/science records of the 60s and 70s). But there must be plenty of stuff missing, so if you have any ideas let me know. At the moment I am obsessed by finding 8-bit music in disguise – house, jungle, rave, hiphop, gabber, and other non-bleep-arpeggio-pop-chip-music. Now let’s hear it for Osdorp Posse’s Moordenaar from 1992! Rap not suitable for mutherfuckers under 16 years of age.

UPDATE: read the lyrics below, as translated by the queen of the dutch ebonyx noise glitches, Rosa Menkman!

“next stop: osdorp.” i was in tram 5 and i had a boner, and next to me was a sexy chick. i wanted to go and then there was an old woman. she said you should get up for me, and then i said – “shut up you with your wrinkled pussy, def p is sitting here and he has no money. so give me your money or i will use violence”. then the ticket inspectors came running, telling me “be quiet and give me your ticket”. and i said “dear, did you really think the rapper def p had a ticket?”. then the tram driver came and he closed the door and said with his big pussy “i am sorry but you are out of luck the police is coming.” “listen man, i am from the streets you fucking don’t know who you’re talking to.” i gave him a push and took my shooting gun and did pow pow pow. every body was running but couldn’t get out so then a freak jumped through the window. everybody freaked out and i just kept shooting at the lot. the inspectors, the driver and the old lady were lying on the ground with led in their bodies. the whole tram was soaked in blood, the sexy chick started to feel sick. just as i went to rape her, i heard four screaming tires. that was the motherfucking police with their motherfucking justice. but they were out of luck because i already left. can yu imagine def p in a cell? you think i might be crazy, but i am just a murderer. murderer. murderer. murderer.

Copy Right And Copy Wrong

1. Calling what Frankmusik did plagiarism, like I just did, is stupid since he merely sampled a few seconds from a rather generic part of a song. We’re not calling the whole jungle genre plagiarism, are we?

2.Everybody is inspired by something. Everybody samples, or atleast “samples” – not just composers, but chefs, children and anything with a brain. Don’t you read the philosophy tabloids? The author is dead!

3. Well, that might be a bit much for pragmatic reasoning. But what if we would take the chip-plagiarism-paranoias further? Is the wet dream to have a relentless universal machine that scans the world’s storage devices for copyright infringements? DJ Assault would have the ass and titties of LSDJ-users incarcerated. (his voice is among the default samples of this Gameboy software) But more seriously, I remember when Shitmat’s album Hang The Dj (dl) couldn’t be released through a certain label because a gigantic sample-checking computer said no. There were too many copyright infringements. (Does anyone have the story on this, or was it all just a dream?) These stories don’t really make anyone happy, do they?

4. We don’t have to only see the mechanical (economical) rights of copyright, which in its constant global increase has proven to be a gold mine for profiters but a disaster for ‘remix culture’. Instead, we can talk about the moral rights of copyright, which is a European tradition that USA (and some others) still does not fully incorporate. It means that the author’s name should always be mentioned, modifications are not allowed without consent, and similar things. As a fresh breeze in commodity land, it is not possible to sell these rights, although you can waive them in contracts.

5. But moral rights seem rarely enforced. It’s not like Madonna is going to sue a radio station for not mentioning her name or shortening/changing a song. Her publishers are not likely to be interested either. But upholding these moral rights were and continue to be important for composers in the demoscene where there is no sanctioning authority, yet a strong urge to be credited for your work. Credit the works you cover or sample from, or others will find out and discredit you. However, you are not likely to be honest if you haven’t cleared your samples and risk being sued. Creative commons is only good for knowing which works you can play around with, but there is no formal protection of people misusing your work just because you put a CC-license on it. Atleast that is my experience from it.

6. Well, just some reflections on copyright with no hot ending to it (yet).  This post was just supposed to be another silly announcement of Frankmusik sampling music from the C64 demoscene. So here it is: Frankmusik – In Step (@2:20) samples PFK – Beer Station. It’s basically the same thing as he did the last time – a break with a loop from a C64-demoscene song. Enjoy! I’ll finish this off with the C64-pixel piece Concubism by Archmage, for no apparent reason. (or, hm, maybe that Archmage is from Norway and so is PFK and GRG)

Another Plagiarism

Yeah, 2009! Through this CSDb-thread I just learnt that the Brittish electro artist Frankmusik has sampled a bit of a C64 tune from 1993 by the demoscener Jeff. After previous controversies there has been a fair amount of threads about ‘another theft from the scene’ in the forums at 8bitcollective and CSDb. Frankmusik’s sample of the song from Jeff is worse than these because 1) it is a mainstream artist (Island Records) that presumably cashes in a bit of money, which is a standard argument among chip-people to bring on the hate, 2) the sampled bar is important to make the break stand out from the rest of the song, 3) Jeff is known as one of those people that say “what’s made in the scene stays in the scene” (atleast for me).

However, what’s sampled is a few seconds of bass/drums/arpeggio in a somewhat “generic” part of Jeff’s song. Frankmusik also changed some of the percussions from the original song. In the sampled bars the tones are not the same (maybe he thought he could get away with it that way hehe). It seems these percussion sounds are also used in other parts of the song, in the original mix, but maybe that’s just some sine-wave pitch-down, I can’t really tell. (maybe some spectral detective work is in order)

It could be that the outcome of this is affected by a certain court case going on in Finland. On January 24th we can expect a decision from the Helsinki district court, regarding Glenn Rune Gallefoss and Universal Music. Again, this is the demoscene having a go at Timbaland only  this time it’s not about the composition of the song (which was made by Tempest on Amiga) but the performance of the song (which was made by GRG on C64). As opposed to the old dispute, this time there is actually a court involved and there are several interesting aspects of it (which I will probably expand on in a few weeks time). One of the more funny incidents is that in order to convince the court that GRG’s work involved creativity and not plain conversion of the original composition, the court apparently listened to five different SID-covers of Popcorn! I think that’s just brilliant. But anyway – here are the links to the songs that this post was supposed to be about.

Jeff – Castle Camelot SID + CSDb
Frankmusik – 3 Little Words (Frankisum Version) Youtube
(other versions of the song is available on his myspace)

Edit: Forgot to clarify: Jeff’s song can be heard at 02:20 in the Youtube-clip. On Frankmusik’s last.fm-bio it says he samples C64. :) And apparently the EP is limited to 200 copies.

Edit Jan08: The sample from Jeff’s song is probably not in the newer versions of the song, released on Island Records. The youtube-clip is apparently some kind of beta of both the song and the video. I also learned that Island Records is a part of the Universal Music Group these days (which seems like a messy story including brands such as Motor Urban Def Jam Records). This will not lead to another C64 vs Universalism, since Jeff is taking it easy.