Oh My God! He Ripped!!!

Written by Makke

Yesterday when I was doing some talking on IRC with my Comic Pirates friends I downloaded a lot of old d-mags and demos, just 'cuz I felt like reading and watching something before going to bed. I unpacked all the goodies I'd been downloading for the past two hours and began to check them out. You know, checking so everything worked and what I had to run from DOS and what I could from Windows.

When firing up an old issue of New World Order (issue #8 I think) I got a runtime error, both in DOS and Windows. The program started anyway, so I just browsed through the various articles, didn't read anything in particular. But when I had browsed through everything I just had to check the various musix out. The first one was pretty good I thought, and I moved on to the next song by pressing F2.

And then everything in my head stopped for a second. The beginning of this song was EXACTLY like one of my own songs started. My first thought was:

"What the f**k! THIS DUDE RIPPED MY BEGINNING!!!" But after thinking a little more (when my brain had swallowed the chock) I found if impossible that this guy had ripped my beginning, as his song was made two years before my was. Jesus! Now people will believe I ripped this guy's beginning! And I can see if people will believe so, the first second is exactly like my song. It's the same synth-riff, with almost the same samples (if not THE same samples).

This got me thinking very much. People are very quick at judging what is ripped and what's not, and this can really damage somebody's reputation! People simply RAGE against rippers. We ALL hate a true ripper. There was a case of that last summer (summer of 1998). Don't remember the guy's name, but he had ripped songs by Elwood, Purple Motion, Robert Miles and many more. They could easily be called VERY good remixes. Because they were very good remixes. He was good at hiding the fact that most of the melodies and chords were ripped. But if you listened to his songs and right after that listened to the song he had ripped, the similarities were overwhelming.

So now at least I will think twice before calling somebody a ripper, and won't even think about calling somebody a ripper if I don't have at least two cases of ripped songs.

- Makke / Comic Pirates / Hugi

(If you want to compare my song called "Electric Shades" and Guybrush's song called Moon Night you can get my song at Hornet, and Guybrush's song is included in New World Order #8).