PLAGIARISM
Since “the performative turn” of the 1960s, when art and culture in many ways moved its focus from fixed objects into performances and processes, the romantic notion of The Author has been increasingly problematized. What constitutes a “work” and how can it be used?
Western copyright culture is dominating the world: the status of indigenous traditions and questions of aesthetics are ultimately a question for The Law. Chipmusic is interesting because it has a long history of conflicts between copyright and copyleft, usually solved outside the law with the internal norms of the demoscene and cracker subcultures. It has worked inbetween naive copyright dogmas and remix idealism for a long time.
Plagiarism is a very strong word, and was the suitable for the earliest entries here (Timbaland, Fitts For Fight, Laromlab), but many of the cases added are more moderate examples of sampling or covering. This list attempts to list artists using (sampling, covering) chipmusic – here understood as e.g videogame music, demoscene music, label releases, and so on.
Also check: 8bitcollective’s Hall of Shame, MOD Archive’s Hall of Shame, long discussion at pouet on demoscene music rip-offs etc.
TV DEATH SQUAD (2009). American artist using music from Random, Mesu Kasumai, Goto80, Psilodump, Ten and Tracer, Combatdave, Wiklund. Denied plagiarism accusations. chipflip
WERMUT (2008). German darkwave artist using a whole song by Mindflow. chipflip interview
FRANKMUSIK (2008). Brittish electro artist signed to Island Records samples rather moderately from two C64 demoscene songs. More info here and here.
CRYSTAL CASTLES (2008). Heavy sampling and rearrangement of songs by Lo-Bat, and a beat-snippet sampled from Covox (spectral analysed by nitro2k01). Currently no action has been taken. Civilised blog-post here and chiphate here. A bizarre detail is how Crystal Castles and Timbaland have used the same pulsewave-arpeggios in their songs (although a rather generic progression) – check it.
LAROMLAB (2008). Album-release and touring, claiming authorship to previously released chipmusic mostly without modifying the original. Public apology followed. Details at Crazy Q’s page. Original songs by Dubmood, Crazy Q, Dma-Sc, Aleksi Eeben, Lotek Style, Gasman, Ikuma, Random, and Goto80.
GOOJET COMMERCIAL (2008). Unauthorized use of a C64-song by Jeroen Tel. No actions have been taken. watch
NELLY FURTADO – DO IT (2007). Acid Jazzed Evening was used in this song, produced by Timbaland. Original Amiga composition by Tempest but Timbaland used GRG’s C64-cover of the song. Check out this torrent or this youtube-clip to get the idea. Details at the wikipedia-article. Currently (September 2009) Tempest is “not talking about it” while GRG is still in a legal process.
SWEDISH RADIO P3 (2007-now). The comedy program Pang Prego used cut-up versions of Goto80’s song Pappap as a jingle throughout the season – without permission, without crediting.
FITTS FOR FIGHT (2007). Using songs from micromusic.net and the demoscene and putting vocals on top. Details in the micromusic statement. Public apology followed. Original songs by Stu, Binärpilot, DVD Heijden, 505, 8BitWeapon, DRX, Kluster Bounce, Arachno, and Yerzmey.
DIPLO – DIPLO RHYTHM (2004). Uses the music from the NES-game Platoon throughout the whole song. Released on Big Dada. youtube
BASTIAN – YOU’VE GOT MY LOVE (2003?). This song includes a beat from Jeroen Tel and Reyn Ouwehand’s C64 song Rubicon. Bastian paid for it in the end.
ABE DUQUE – CHAMPAGNE DAYS, COCAINE NIGHTS (2003). Extensively samples the C64-tune Knight Tyme by David Whittaker. Excerpt from Duque’s tune here. According to discogs credits are in the notes of the record.
JAMSTER – CRAZY FROG (200?). Using Bodenständig 2000’s song ‘In Rock 8 Bit’ in Crazy Frog TV-ads without permission. See comment field for more info.
SCOOTER – THE STADIUM TECHNO EXPERIENCE (2003). “Level 1″ – main melody covered from Chris Hülsbeck’s song “Freedom” for Turrican (2?). “A Little Bit Too Fast” samples the song “I Am Rushin’” by Chris Hülsbeck according to wikipedia.
ZOMBIE NATION – KERNKRAFT 400 (1999). Main melody covered from David Whittaker’s Lazy Jones (subtrack21). According to NME Whittaker received money for it.
DIMMU BORGIR – SORGENS KAMMER (1996). Covering Tim Wright’s music from the Amiga game Agony without credit.
MORE INFO NEEDED
MTV Netherlands using Goto80’s song Comsten in a jingle. (2007)
2 Unlimited using music from Jeroen Tel.
MOD-RIPPING
The Mod Archive had a Rippers Listing, now located here. An extreme example of mod-appropriation is when the PC-composers Purple Motion and Unreal got their songs appropriated by Jay Newingham. Check details here. Actually, the songs are still around in his own name – here. If you search for “jay” on this page you can see how a discussion about copyright in the demoscene could loook like, in the light of this case. Dj Distance ripped off mods in 2003, read about it here. Dj Isabelle ripped off mods in 2000, read about it here.
May 6, 2008 at 10:05 pm |
Nice one Mr.!
Perhaps you want to add this one? You be teh judge:
Junior Senior – Move Your Feet:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=BmMln54lt9A
Stefan Konarkowski (Alien) – Funky Smile (Workaholic 3)
http://www.se2a1.net:40000/soasc/MOS6581R4/MUSICIANS/A/Alien_WOW/Funky_Smile_Workaholic3_T01.sid.mp3
May 6, 2008 at 10:21 pm |
Yeah, I saw it. Although it is a bit similar, I’ve chosen not to include it… Anyone against?
May 8, 2008 at 11:50 pm |
[...] Infringements, Chiptune Music Theft Continues; Crystal Castles Abuses Creative Commons License and chipflip: plagiarism. The best place for information, however, is the epic (now 23 page) thread on the 8bitcollective [...]
May 9, 2008 at 2:14 pm |
[...] chipflip blog [...]
May 24, 2008 at 3:00 pm |
that “Alien vs. Junior Senior” is really far-fetched. It’s good that you didn’t include it in your story. Claims from tonedeafs only hurt the cases of the chipmusicians involved.
July 3, 2008 at 3:24 pm |
[...] by the Crystal Castles buzz, which I never wrote about here (well, it’s mentioned in the plagiarism-page). Anyway. I will try to stick to saying chiptune about a particular chip..eh..tune..song, which is [...]
August 26, 2008 at 3:01 pm |
[...] CHIPFLIP: Plagiarism [...]
September 14, 2008 at 11:33 am |
@Pimpfest: I dunno about that. It’s an extremely similar chord progression and baseline. The dissonance makes it harder to hear but it’s definitely similar in parts.
December 15, 2008 at 7:48 pm |
[...] Copyright The demoscene grew up outside the market and laws that everybody had to follow. It is a very obscure, internal and bound subculture. Because most products are open source, remixing is very easy. Moreover, all the works are easy to reverse engineer since the code is always accessible through ‘disassembly’. (but it is harder to read that code, since ‘labels’ are removed. so there is no ‘free text’ anymore labeling a piece of the code as ‘jumping chains of death’, ’shitfuck’, or ‘dogman’, or lolcat). It is striking then, that even in this day and age, remixing doesn’t play a big role within the demoscene; in fact, the whole scene is based on an originality dogma. The people that are not doing cool stuff (like copying someone else’s code) are sanctioned by the collective by losing their ’status’. As history plays a paradoxical role, lately the chip music scene has had a lot of problems with copyright, since artists (like Crystal Castles and Nelly Furtado/Timbaland) from outside the scene have been ‘remixing’ music for commercial purposes, without permission from the makers. read more. [...]
January 7, 2009 at 5:39 pm |
[...] 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 [...]
June 12, 2009 at 9:07 am |
[...] from Ryuichi Sakamoto & David Sylvian (youtube). I’ve decided not to add this to the plagiarism page. Seems like Anggune is most similar to Sakamoto & Sylvian after all. [...]
June 30, 2009 at 11:34 am |
[...] don’t speak for anyone but yourself but I would be interested in your take on this. On your plagiarism page you talk about the Demo Scene’s internal (and fairly effective) method of dealing with [...]
August 9, 2009 at 10:11 pm |
Hej,
the Jamster case went like this: The animator of the “crazy frog”, before known as “the annoying thing”, once contacted Bodenständig 2000 asking if he could use “In Rock 8 Bit” for his now legendary animation. At this point it was just some fun he made in his free time. We agreed on letting him do it, he was “one of us”.
The video he made spread online, people posted it around in emails etc. Jamster in many cases just took animations that were popular online and sold them to people with mobile phones. The same here, they contacted the animator and licensed the video from him. The animator made clear that they didn’t have the rights to the sound track though. Bodenständig 2000 was never contacted.
In Germany the daughter company Jamba ran TV ads with the “crazy frog” using another music, that sounded a quite familiar but was not the same. So we thought that everything was alright. But then fans from the rest of the world wrote emails to us stating that in their countries, Jamster was using the original tune in TV ads. It proved to be true, a bad-ass rip-off.
Our hippie-publisher Stora/Freibank started some lawyer action. Some lawyers wrote some letters to each other, an expert was commissioned to prove that the tune is not a composition, another expert was commissioned to prove the opposite … in the end, after many years of paper being filled up, Bodenständig got some pocket money without a trial.
Jamster until the end claimed that they have no idea themselves how often their spot was aired because “they keep no records”. People who watched TV during the period in question know that it was on almost every 15 minutes on music channels, for several weeks. However, the tune was never sold as a ringtone, but to advertise another ringtone.
Well, i am glad its over, was just eating up nerves and energy.
drx/Bodenständig 2000
August 13, 2009 at 10:43 pm |
Just so you know, the modarchive ripper list is still online, but in a more “interactive” way – it’s hosted at our forums:
http://modarchive.org/forums/index.php?board=85.0