Gameboy Genius

Crystal Castles and Chip Music Copyright Infringements

May 6th, 2008

Introduction

Here’s a little rant about Crystal Castles and their recently revealed copyright violations. First off I think I should explain why I care at all. I generally do support copyright violation, and I willingly take part in downloading as well as uploading copyrighted material to various P2P networks. However, I draw a line between the act of personally copying and sharing material for no other gain than the material itself, and using copyright violation as a means of generating a monetary profit. The previous is inevitable in today’s age of information while the latter, at least from case to case, can be seen as morally wrong.

Rant about CC and Copyright in General

Another argument that needs to be acknowledged is that sampling is an integral part of today’s electronic music scene. The story about the Amen break comes into mind. The Amen was a breakbeat from a 1969 record that was sampled and quickly grew popular in the early 90’s. It was highly influencial to at least these genres of music: Jungle, Rave, Drum and Bass, Hiphop, and probably others too. Why do I bring up the Amen here? Because it’s an example of where sampling led to innovation. It is also an example of where underground producers sampled mainstream material and turned it into something original.

Crystal Castles’ use of sampling, however, is quite the opposite: It’s an example of a mainstream producer sampling underground musicians. And it’s also an example of, should we call it anti-innovation, where something quote original is taken and being adapted to the mainstream. You end up in a situation where the newly created work is less innovative than the works being sampled.

This is not something that is unique to CC though. A number of less known artists have outright stolen materials from others, claiming it to be their own. However, more notably, hip-hop producer Timbaland sampled the song Acidjazzed Evening by finnish Amiga musician Janne Suni, and used it in Nelly Furtado’s song Do It, without any attribution to Janne. It has come to a point where “Being Timbalanded” is a common expression on the scene to describe when someone’s work is used in the mainstream without permission.
It seems like people like Timbaland and Crystal Castles think that just because the chip music scene is mostly based on altruism and non-profit sharing of one’s music, it means that the chip music is in the public domain, being free for anyone to use as they see fit.

I’m wondering if the unauthorized sampling of chiptunes is a very conscious move from CC’s side. They know they’ve got enough money to pay expensive lawyers, and in the end the sampled artists might not care about their rights. And even if the original artist does care, files a law suit and wins, a major record label has enough money to pay the damages, and in the same time CC gets attention. In the end most listeners don’t care about whether their idols sampled someone else. “All attention is good attention” , as the saying goes.
I’m even starting to wonder whether Crystal Castles as a concept is based on stealing other’s materials without permission. The new kind of punk, copyright infringement for money.

In the same time they’ve managed to popularize their music in a way the chip musicians have not been able to. Could it be that most people can not appreciate pure chip sounds, but need something else, more mainstreamed, more polished, or in other words, party music that is danceable and not too abstract. From that point of view they’re definitely filling a need, be it at the expense of others.

Claims of Unauthorized Use of Copyrighted Materials by Crystal Castles

Their album Crystal Castles and Trevor Brown
It turned out that the original Crystal Castles’ album with the same name had a cover using the artwork of the graphical artist Trevor Brown, a picture of Madonna with a black eye. (Top image) The same picture had previously been used for a cassette cover released about 1999 by the Japanese label Beast 666 Records. (Bottom image)

Here’s his story in brief:
Crystal Castles used his artwork for their debut 7″ record, and T-shirts without asking Trevor Brown for permission. A friend of his notified him. He contacted CC’s lawyers to get compensation. They sent him a contract with ridiculous terms that they wanted him to sign.
You can read his full story here

“Love and Caring” <-> Covox - Sunday
I heard CC’s song Love and Caring and I immediately recognized beats from Covox’ Sunday. But what if, for the sake of argument, CC managed to produce a sound which was just quite similar to that of Covox’ song. Or heck, if they even tried to emulate the sound that he managed to achieve in Sunday.
Well, here’s the funny part. Apart from on a rare demo CD (Which I btw happen to own) it was only ever released to the public as a demo MP3 on his website. The said MP3 file is encoded with a low bitrate, which gives the sound defects that are very easy to spot with some spectral analysis. Not only could I determine that CC are using the beats from Sunday, but the patterns were so significant that I could determine that CC was using the first and second beat from Covox’ song.

These images shows the two first beats from both the songs, CC at the top, Covox at the bottom. The first thing you can notice is the overall similarity between the two. There’s a large gap between 9 kHz and 12 kHz, because of the MP3 compression. There are also some little quirks that I’ve especially pointed out. (Green circles) They are everywhere of course, since it’s the same sound, but the ones pointed out are easy to see.
Also, the hits in Covox’ song look different for each hit, because the MP3 compression takes a little differently on each hit. On the other hand in CC’s song every hit of the same type has the same quirks, meaning it’s the same beat user over and over, and this happens to be the first and second beat, coressponding a kick and hihat.
I’ll also take the opportunity to point to things with CC’s mastering. Notice the vertical lines (Marked with blue arrows) these indicate clipping of the waveform, aka distortion. Also notice the horizontal line, also marked with a blue arrow. This is an artefact from when Sunday was recorded. It’s a form of high pitched tone which I actually hear as a separate sound because of the boosting of those frequencies. (Ouch) Btw, since this tone is at a little below 16 kHz, I can tell Sunday was probably recorded off of a Super Gameboy rather than a DMG.

Covox - Sunday can be downloaded here: http://www.covox.net/?audio
Right now I don’t know a place to listen to the song in full for free, but you can listen to a portion of it here:
Download
I deem this as ok from a copyright point of view since most of the quoted material doesn’t belong to them anyway.

“Insecticon” <-> Lo-Bat - My Little Droid Needs A Hand and Covox - Sunday
Basically the same song with different pitch. Insecticon can be downloaded from their MySpace. The original song can be downloaded from Lo-Bat’s front page:http://www.lo-bat.be/. They’re using the same drum samples from Sunday.
The sampling of Lo-Bat breaks the Creative Commons license, ironically also abbreviated CC.

Here’s a comparison between the two. (Updated video)

“TV Babies” <-> X-agon - Lamerina
This one is blatantly obvious.

TV Babies: (Skip to 00:50)

X-agon - Lamerina:
X-agon - Lamerina
TV Babies is unreleased.

Everybody! I need your help! If you know of other songs which have been or might have been ripped off by CC, please leave a comment here if you find something.

More infos:
Discussion on 8bitcollective
Article on Create Digital Music
Creative Commons

Update 1
This was dug up from the thread on 8bc:
Andy, representing Crystal Castles, sent this to Lameboy, one of the admins on 8bc.

Andy:
I’m not sure if I was clear in my message to you that songs with Lo-Bat samples were left off the CC album because we didn’t have the sample clearance. Many songs were left off the CD because we needed more time to clear the samples. We are hoping to have the songs on a future release (maybe a rarities/demos/remixes compilation) and would love to clear this with Lo-Bat. If you can get a contact for him through the 8bit forum that would be great and we can finally release these tracks.

It’s a sign of courtesy, but there are still things to be sorted out. More later.

Update 2
“xxzxczx me” <-> Eat Rabbit - ???
Quoted here as being stolen from an Eat Rabbit tune. Still need details on which one.
Mr Rabbit says he can’t hear traces of his own tracks in xxzxczx me. So I’ll strike that one out.

Update 3
It has come to my attention that the track Mother Knows Best samples Lo-Bat’s track Tizzy almost off the shelf. And Covox’ drums are there in the background as usual too.
This track was released on a 7″ vinyl, and is still for sale through iTunes.

Listen to TizzyTizzy
Listen to Mother knows best on last.fm
There used to be an official video for the track on Youtube, but it was removed.

Update 4
Added this video to the section about insecticon .

Update 5
Added TV Babies to the list.

Update 6
Check out my new article Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating vs 50 Cent - Ayo Technology (Who sampled who?) which investigates the similarities between Ayo Technology and Courtship Dating.
There’s also a new Myspace profile called Crystal Theft with the purpose of spreading the word about this. Show your support by adding them to your top friends list.