Just recently the Norwegian band Fitts For Fight stole chiptunes from Stu, Binärpilot, drx, and others. They added their vocals and got hyped in Norway for their teen trash porn DIY style, and apparently made some money off it. After this scandal though, them and “their” songs got taken off Myspace and Last.fm. People are upset with this, and you can support their quest to find the original authors here. Eventhough stealing things without credit atleast used to be quite normal in the chipmusic scene, this is a bit too much! I can’t help but finding it a bit funny though. :)
Other examples of commercial rip-offs of chip music:
* Nelly Furtado’s last album featured a song called ‘Do It’ that was a total rip-off of Tempest‘s song Acid Jazzed Evening. Check out this torrent or this youtube-clip to get the idea. Legal action in the air…
* An older “rip-off” is the MTV-hit You’ve Got My Love where Bastian sampled the drums off Jeroen Tel and Reyn Ouwehand’s old C-64 song Rubicon. In the end, Bastian had to pay for it though.
* Bodenständig 2000 got ripped off by the commercial mobile phone terrorists Jamba a couple of years ago. I forgot about the details though…
* Zombie Nation‘s ‘Kernkraft 400’ covered David Whittaker’s Lazy Jones (subtrack21) but according to NME Whittaker did actually receive money for it.
I can’t think of any more examples. Help me out here. But anyway, the moral of this story is: don’t just take it away!