Game Boy musician nitro2k01 has taken on the controversy over Crystal Castles, the band that 
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2008-May-06@11:18Chiptune Music Theft Continues; Crystal Castles Abuses Creative Commons License
As using sounds produced on unusual 8-bit systems and game consoles grows in popularity, some artists are appropriating the music as their own. Sometimes, as with Beck, a well-known or better-marketed artist is using lesser-known artists for purposes of novelty. That alone has riled some in the hard-core chiptune community. In some cases, though, artists are resorting to outright theft. In the most recent case, part of the problem is people misunderstanding Creative Commons licenses, even though those licenses are designed to encourage sharing.
Is Creative Commons a safe license to use, or does it encourage this kind of theft? I think CC is actually a solution, not part of the problem – and this illustrates that.
Not Just Timbaland: Fitts for Fights Syndrome
Online music piracy is well known. But ready access to music online has led to a much more serious problem: digital plagiarism.
The best known case, of course, is the infamous 2007 Timbaland Controversy, in which Timbaland apparently stole musical elements from Finnish demoscene artist Tempest in the song Do It by Nelly Furtado. (See EM411 story, Wikipedia article.) But Timbaland isn’t alone.
At least Timbaland was using a sample; some artists steal whole songs outright. The notorious Norwegian duo Fitts for Fights performed entire sets stolen from demoscene/"microscene" recordings — and kept playing the stolen tunes live.
In April of this year, Laromlab released an entire album — every last track — stolen from other recordings. After CMJ reported the story, widely discussed on chip community 8-bit collective, the "artist" was forced to admit the entire album was a "hoax." (Thanks, Peter Swimm, for the tip.)
In fact, the track record here demonstrates that, for all Timbaland’s press as the most famous figure involved, micromusical plagiarism is rampant. It’s not just geeks getting defensive; there’s something to this, fueled by the novelty and apparent obscurity of the music. (See also: an ongoing thread on Pouet.net.)
Crystal Castles and Creative Commons
The latest episode combines 8-bit musical plagiarism with an abuse of Creative Commons licenses. Crystal Castles is a Toronto-based band that’s gotten quite a lot of positive press for their use of 8-bit sounds, including a keyboard with an Atari chip. (And there’s the source of the problem: this stuff is "hot" partly because it’s novel to mainstream press.)
Unfortunately, some of Crystal Castles’ sound apparently isn’t their their own.
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Fathers have played a big part in a lot of our lives — well, at the very least, they’re an irreplaceable 50% of the fact that you exist at all. My Dad inspired a love of music, letting me experience the musical power of a college basketball pep band (still the greatest orchestration ever), playing rock and roll riffs on a sax, helping support my often-irrational love of musical technological projects, and still voicing support for whatever crazy endeavor I’ve come up with most recently. He bought me my first computer, my first studio (hello, Casio!), and my first computer music studio (hello, Roland and Cakewalk!). 
