Chiptune 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.
/* Buy links if custom fields not null and not in cat or search results */ ?> /* End Buy links if custom fields not null and not in cat or search results */ ?>


Nine Inch Nails are back with another free release; this time, it’s an upcoming album release called "The Slip". And NIN continue to give us the kinds of formats we like, with the income this time coming entirely from physical sales:
CDM traffic has taken a sudden plunge. Now, it could be all those digital DJ stories (um, sorry about that), but based on past experience, we tend to see a dip in readership whenever the weather turns lovely (which also happens to coincide with the end of the semester, a big deal for the many readers in school). I, for one, love the outdoors (despite what you might suspect reading this site), and absolutely encourage the trend! (And if you’re just studying for exams, I’ll send you positive Brain Energy.)

Digital vinyl systems like Serato Scratch LIVE and Native Instruments Traktor Scratch are designed for DJs. Part of the whole advantage is that you get an integrated system with vinyl, decoding capability, audio interfacing with the computer, and software for DJ functions. If you want to take the turntable to other frontiers, you have to find a way to get the timecode data from the vinyl directly and do something different with it, like control an instrument or scratch visuals. (Only recently did a big-name, mainstream DVS, Serato, take on visuals,

Musicians have generally had to shy away from slim, light portable PC laptops, but watching the specs on these machines, I’d say that’s finally changing. Take the upcoming Lenovo IdeaPad U110. Like the Apple MacBook Air, you have to rely on an external optical drive, but otherwise, this machine comes pretty close to being a worthy mobile music machine. If shedding pounds and size is important to you, there’s no question you could make this box work on the road.





