Music | May 10, 2008 | 5 comments

Crystal Castles abuses creative commons license

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lwhi
"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.

8-bit collective again noticed something is amiss, this time with their track "Insecticon." Far from simply sampling a track, the tune rearranges entire musical contents as the basis of the new tune. (Many in the 8-bit collective community at least claim they’re pro-sampling.)

There’s a difference in this case, though: the tune in question is Creative Commons-licensed. It’s possible Crystal Castles thought, incorrectly, that that meant "free." However, the CC license used specifically requires attribution, non-commercial use, and that the derivative work be released under the same license — that’s three strikes against Crystal Castles. The GPL license used in open source software has similar stipulations, and neither license means something isn’t protected by copyright law — the maker of something is still the copyright holder, and uses those rights to define the way in which they want their work used and shared."
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