Pop rips off the demoscene

Timbaland rips off an old demoscene tune in Nelly Furtado's Do It.

This is a prime piece of scumbaggery, but I find it illuminating how easily the words "steal" and "theft" roll off the keyboards of the commentariat. The original author does have a genuine feeling of loss; is this the same feeling that ultimately justifies a prohibition on theft of physical property?

I'm just pleased demoscene music is finally getting some exposure.

Update 2006/01/15: There's more. It turns out Timbaland (real name Timothy Mosley) is shadier than we had anticipated. This video compares Acidjazz.mod to a ringtone 'by' Timbaland from 2005.

The ringtone is still for sale here. You can listen to a local mirror here.

The original Acidjazz.mod is available from scene.org here. For those of you who can't play .mod files, someone has kindly rendered it to MP3 here.

Unlike Do It, the ringtone is a trivial ripoff, adding nothing more than a drum loop over the original song.

It's probably important to note that a copyright notice is not obviously present on the original file. .mod is an ancient format with little metadata support, so composers use the instrument names to write messages, greets, shoutouts and, yes, copyright notices. Acidjazz.mod contains the following instruments:

  0 composed by                          16 greets to fellow
  1 tempest/damage                       17 chippendales&damagers
  2                                      18 mindflow.djb.oxide.
  3 asm2k oldskool music!                19 jeff.reyn.pri.tommy
  4                                      20 pink.andy.andyk.gassy
  5 lenght 3:10                          21 muffler.illusion.duet
  6                                      22 jangler.melwyn.solarc
  7 inspiration from                     23 cube.agemixer.codehead
  8 c64 eleets. thanks                   24 b-lite.hollowman.amj
  9                                      25 electric.carebear
 10 special thanks to:                   26 #c-64 #suomiscene
 11 abaddon.biotek.db.kod                27 and the rest...
 12 mindflow.smirk.reed                  28
 13 teppo.zalza & others                 29   cnd.planet-d.net
 14 for the support.                     30 (c)hippendales'2000
 15

Is that a copyright notice? Or a pun? Demoscene artists have never been the biggest supporters of DRM-lockdown-style copyright, but that (c) is clear to me, as if copyright did not apply by default anyway, as Timbaland, a professional music 'maker' should have been well aware of.

If ever he had been confused over the copyright status of .mod files, scene.org addresses the issue in its very accessible FAQ:

We would like to create and sell compilations of music / demos that we downloaded from scene.org? Can you give us permission?

The International Scene Organization only has distribution rights of the works contained in its archive.

None of the works (songs, demos, graphics, videos) present on our archives are in the public domain. As such you need to contact yourself the respective authors to ask them specifically if they are willing to let you exploit their work commercially.

To do so we suggest you either read the contact info if present in the ftp directory, or from the archives and accompanying text files.

We know it can prove difficult sometimes to locate the copyright holders from the handles they leave with their file. You are then advised to try to reach them through the email addresses contained in readme files, or search their handle in http://ojuice.net's database.

It is inconceivable to me that Timbaland did not know what he was doing was illegal. But was it wrong? Some copyright abolitionists might say no. Others might say the commercial nature of the ripoff makes it different from legitimate remix culture. It's a moral wrong for Timbaland to give no credit, but then lying is a moral wrong which remains legal.

Further reading:

• The original Something Awful thread
• Janne Suni (tempest)'s page for Acidjazzed Evening
• A call to arms on Digg.com
• Youtube video comparing Do It to Acidjazz.mod
• Youtube video comparing Block Party to Acidjazz.mod