Comments on: Chiptune Music Theft Continues; Crystal Castles Abuses Creative Commons License

By: OLIVER LOPENA photography » Archive » Anamanaguchi

OLIVER LOPENA photography » Archive » Anamanaguchi — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:41:49 +0000

[...] it or not, chiptune/8-bit music has been around much longer than Crystal Castles has been ripping it off. If you’ve never been to a live chiptune performance before, what you might see is a guy [...]

By: Max

Max — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 11:40:07 +0000

There is a reason CC use artist work without permisson. Why they use samples from chiptune artists without a care for them.
Because they dont give two shits! There attitue is were going to play this music, so either like it ordont. And there loved by all for it!
Also, this isall great publiserty. Using artwork banned by the artist and pastin it over everything! Brillient idea!

Love Crystal Castles, theve really got it just right. :)

By: The BliepBliep Exhibition « CHIPFLIP

The BliepBliep Exhibition « CHIPFLIP — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:58:46 +0000

[...] by Nullsleep (with the track Chippon), which is a good choice. The genre 8bit was represented by Crystal Castles with the track Courtship Dating, which might not be an equally satisfying choice for everyone. [...]

By: Create Digital Music » Chip Strikes Back: Finnish Label Sues Timbaland, Nelly Furtado

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:38:49 +0000

[...] unlike Timbaland/Nelly Furtado, their track was not widely released, let alone a huge chart hit). Original story / Crystal Castles responds to allegations. GA_googleFillSlot("CDMU_interpost_rect"); [...]

By: Collin

Collin — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:58:38 +0000

Also, Lo-Bat or whatever his name is had the track posted on his site for free sampling at the time. You all have been proved wrong and look stupid.

By: Collin

Collin — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:55:45 +0000

Crystal Castles was just messing around with this when they made the track. They did not post it to the public, Lies Records did, one of their record companies. They did not intend for this to be out in the open, the fault is not theirs. They never performed this live either, so nothing was abused.

By: diodywosums

diodywosums — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 13:51:44 +0000

Hey, just i just wanted to remind, tha global I4oTuFskPCc4 is near.

By: Hi-Fi Hero - MichelGondry.com

Hi-Fi Hero - MichelGondry.com — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:44:18 +0000

[...] here’s some links for anyone not aware of some of Crystal Castles’ old bullshit. Link1 + [...]

By: anti-canadian

anti-canadian — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:50:01 +0000

Toronto music scene is dying…it shoulda been dead before it started. A bunch of egotistical jerks who just steal from one another in an effort to be cool. CC is not the first group to “rip off” other artists…popular remixes artists from toronto will do this all the time; they steal a line from one lesser knowm electro track, plop it with a pop song, call it “Pop-song So-and-so’s remix” without giving any credit to the artist who’s line they stole. They try to do the LA banger house scene, or the Brooklyn/UK ambient electro scene but in the end it just sounds like a huge ripoff.

By: Will C.

Will C. — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:28:27 +0000

Speaking as an artist, albeit an amateur, I will say a few things. The first is that it seems to me a lot of this outrage is simply puerile – boring jabs at Crystal Castle’s style and outrageous accusations that all of Crystal Castles’ material is stolen. (Personally, I enjoyed the Crystal Castles album. It’s no paragon of innovation, but the songwriting is consistent and diverse and the tracks are almost uniformly memorable, which isn’t something I can really say for any chiptune albums I’ve come across.)
The second thing is that it seems funny that people in the chiptune scene are so outraged about it. For years the scene has complained about being marginalized, overlooked, and misunderstood, but if it is going to get any attention, it’ll be through young artists like Crystal Castles, borrowing liberally from the scene’s ideas but taking it in a new, poppier direction.
The third thing is that today’s attitude towards “plagiarism” is really strangling to artistic innovation in the field of sampling – a field which has been and likely will be the most interesting one in music technology for quite a while. By the definitions of plagiarism offered here, enormous chunks of music history are plagiarized – the entire old-skool hardcore scene, for example, was built on unattributed samples ranging from the classic “Amen” break to movie clips and on occasion passages of popular songs. Is it plagiarism? Honestly, I don’t think so. Taking drum samples or brief passages from a song and recontextualizing them isn’t plagiarism, any more than T.S. Eliot’s works are plagiarism of Shakespeare, Dante, and the like. (Before anyone argues that T.S. Eliot expected his readers to recognize his quotations, look into some of the sources “The Waste Land” and “Prufrock” borrow from – even most English majors wouldn’t catch most of them without help.) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, trite as that may be, and this “flattery” is the lifeblood of art.
My final point is that when it comes down to it I don’t care whether my favorite artists committed these supposedly heinous ethical breaches. I’m not the type to hand-wring over who Daft Punk samples any more than I obsess over the personal life of Wagner (well-known to be reprehensible). I listen to music and absorb art not to analyze the life and ethics of the artist but to find something that connects. Spending hours worrying about this or that artist’s moral standing, to me, is antithetical to any sort of real understanding of music.