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?"

Comments

Elvis estate sues RIAA

[autophile]

In other news, the estate of Elvis is reportedly suing all artists signed with RIAA labels due to their use of the "I-IV-V" progression.

I think that there are enough simple melodies polluting the "root melodyspace" to start producing spurious similarities.

--Rob

Re:Ha ha ha ho ho ho hee hee hee eheheheheheh

[Overly Critical Guy]

I'm not conflating anything together. This all boils down to trademarks and copyrights, which Slashdotters are normally against except when "one of their own" is the target of infringement--such as a demoscener, open source developers writing GPL code, and so forth. That was my point, and it still stands.

No

[Trogre]

How could he steal it if he didn't deprive the Tempest of anything? Did he sneak into his basements at night and take the only floppy disk that had that sample on it?

The above was adapted from the Official /. definition of stealing.

So while we're still at /., at worst this is a copyright infringement. I don't know how the work was originally released but suspect it probably wasn't Public Domain or a Creative Commons flavour.

Of course if the demoscene wasn't interested in making money out of this they would have released it with an appropriate licence in the first place and taken the recent discovery as an ego-boost right?

Musician != Sampler

[pandrijeczko]

Just to correct a few things in the posts so far:

1. A "musician" is someone who takes the time and trouble to learn how to play an instrument (or indeed to sing) and then spends a considerable amount of effort writing new and original songs that the musician, possibly with other muscians, may then well present to an audience. An "entrepreneur" is some chap up on a stage behind two record decks who has come to the realisation that 2000 kids who are out of their heads on "e" will pay good money to jiggle around to any old rubbish being played over speakers providing there are enough flashing lights.

2. Any chap who can't even think of looking in the mirror to check his that his baseball cap is on the right way round before he leaves the house probably won't have much useful to say about anything.

3. Please consider wearing correctly tailored trousers if you are in the music scene. If you've got on a pair of jeans where the crutch is round by your knees, you probably won't be very good at running to catch the bloke who's just made off with your Nelly Furtado record collection.

4. Any good DJ knows that you finish off the evening with two slow smoochy songs by The Commodores followed by Jeff Beck's "Hi Ho Silver Lining" - so that all the drunk blokes without women can all get in a circle and kick their legs in the air.

5. I am amazed that all those clumsy DJs who keep knocking and scratching the LPs on their record decks have noe bothered to invest in a technology and format known as "Compact Disc". This allows the disc to be inserted into a playing device which can then be installed on a shelf or cabinet where it is unlikely to be knocked, meaning that the listening pleasure of the audience is not damaged by jumpy records.

6. Can somebody please find out who the names of those big black chaps who keep muttering away to themselves and waving their fingers at me over old classic records that have been jiggled about a bit? The last person who did this is my family was my grandmother and we put the poor old dear in a home.

no R&B, no jazz

[Travoltus]

Non predominantly white music has had no major influence in the last 30 years?

Hmmmmmm.

I knew there was a reason why you guys hated rap...