Did Producer Timbaland Steal From the Demoscene?

gloom writes "In 2000 the Finnish demoscene musician Janne Suni (also known as 'Tempest') won the Oldskool Music Competition at the Assembly demoparty with his four-channel Amiga .MOD entitled 'Acid Jazzed Evening.' A Commodore 64 musician called 'grg' remade the song on the C64 (using the infamous SID soundchip); it is this that was stolen. The producer's name is Timbaland and he is one of the hottest names in American music these days. The track in question is called 'Do it' and it is featured on the Nelly Furtado album 'Loose' on the Geffen label. Getting nowhere with Geffen, the demoscene has now risen to the aid of Tempest, first by creating a stir at SomethingAwful (files downloadable from the forum), then at Digg.com, then on YouTube, with a video demonstrating the blatant ripoff. Being an online-posting musician myself — what rights do I have if this should ever happen to me, and what can be done to raise awareness about such things?"

Best argument against buying music ever

[bjourne]

Thank you Timbaland, this is a really great argument against buying music. I'll make good use of it to convice the few that I know that still buy music occasionally. First, commerical music is obviously crap since they have to "steal" their music. Second, if it is not immoral for producers to "steal," then why on earth should any consumer feel guilty for taking it back?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Niggers steal things...

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent post gets modded down while the first post gets modded up.

This is new?

[Arivia]

This is new? [wikipedia.org]

Re:You're unoriginal.

[Planesdragon]

Hmm...

0: Pop.
1: Metal.
2: Alternative
3: "Movie Classical"
4: Country
5: Disco
6: Rap.

There's six for you. "Hip-Hop" is just a bastard child of rap and pop. (Rap would be a higher on that list if i ranked on "size of influence.")

Re:hottest name?

[kharchenko]

For starters someone should update his Wikipedia to reflect this "incident" (it's protected for new and unregistered users).

Metal Group "Dimmu Borgir" did this before

[zr-rifle]

Dimmu Borgir [wikipedia.org], a Norwegian Black Metal group, ripped a song from the Amiga game "Agony", composed by Tim Wright. The original was a beautiful piano piece [titan12.free.fr] that you could listen to in the title screen. The band stole the melody and used it in the song "Sorgens Kammer [altayre.free.fr]" ("The Chamber of Sorrow" in Norwegian).

They never acknowledged the ripoff, simply substituting the song with another one in the album. Pathetic.

Re:Piracy is okay if you are rich

[OriginalArlen]

Years ago I used to work at a music publishing company as a tape copier / runner, one of the regular jobs was making "comparison tapes" - ten seconds of one of our tracks, ten seconds from a possible copyright-infringing tune. Anyone out there got New Order's "Republic" andMassive Attack's "Blue Lines"? Listen to the string breakdown at the end of "Special" -- around 4'10" (yes I'm checking!) Now go listen to "Unfinished Sympathy". Eerie, huh?

And how about Manic Street Preachers "Interiors" from the "Everything Must Go" album... listen to the bassline and the rhythm guitar skank. Now compare it to Saint Etienne's "Nothing Can Stop Us Now" from "Foxbase Alpha".

Of course these musicians sold their copyrights to music publishers who have the funding to take legal action. Is there a legal aid programme in Finland?

Re:Uh, okay...

[jacksonj04]

Yep - subtracting the .mod from the Furtado and taking out the drums on an EQ leaves very little backing. I love DSP.

Re:You're unoriginal.

[Registered Coward v2]

Hell, I'd wager that Van Halen (both the band and Eddie Van Halen himself) have been at least as influencial to the music industry as most rap/hip-hop artists out today combined. They not only brought about the beginnings of rock and metal in the 80's, popularizing guitar heroes like no one before, but Eddie redefined how to play the guitar (yes, many, if not most of his popular techniques have been used before, but he popularized them like no other) and redefined the guitar itself (not many people before him put humbuckers in Strats, and he helped develop the Floyd Rose vibrato bridge)

Frank Zappa. You want guitar before EVH, look no further. If you like guitar, check him out. He was a guitar hero long before EVH. I'm not knocking EVH's influence or popularity, but he certainly wasn't the first; just one in a line of great guitarists who help define rock.

Re:Piracy is okay if you are rich

[Hal_Porter]

Actually Internet conventional wisdom is fairly unpredictable when it comes to copyright.

Case 1: Metallica vs the Internet

Metallica, a pasty white but decidedly non nerdy metal band complain about people stealing their music.

Slashdot: LOL, retards. Information wants to be free. Musicians should make money from live gigs + It's copyright infringement not stealing. Stealing is when you take something physical away from someone, like when a mugger took my iRiver full of Metallica songs.

Case 2: Someone uses GPL code in a non GPL product

Slashdot: OMG Stealing! Mailbomb them back to the stoneage!

Case 3: Pasty white Mac fans remix music, get sued

BoingBoing: Information wants to be free. DRM eats babies!

Case 4: A rich black man uses 4 chords from nerdy white guys

Slashdot: ZOMG! Stealing! Plagiarism!

I'd say that the background of the two parties is more important than any deep principle.

Disclaimer: Conventional Wisdom determined by reading comments until I got a headache, not a representative sample.