Selling Ripped Music To Improve Trackers' Reputation

Written by Adok

The old story keeps on repeating. After the DARKflare rip-off, as reported in Hugi #15, two other big cases of ripping occured. This time in the tracker music scene.

We are tired of presenting you another big piece of shit that happened in the beloved music scene. Actually, it's two pieces. The first: Some guy called Firehawk a.k.a. Kyle Krause dared to rip the tune "Another World" from Melcom's recently released Dark Trooper Symphony 4 CD. He modified the credits and uploaded the song to the web-site http://omnigear.net. Melcom accidentially surfed over to this page and there stumbled across the rip-off. He almost felt he had to die at this sight. Immediately he spread the news via e-mail, and the thief was outed on the MODPlug central site. DemoJournal published an article as well. Tough luck for the ripper. How can anybody be so stupid to rip a recently released song and claim that it is his on an Internet site expected to attract many visitors, actually?

Firehawk was forced to remove the song from omnigear.net. In order not to lose his face completely, he wrote the following apology mail to Melcom:

"Listen I was looking for a title ssong [sic!] my site and I found yours on the web. I thought the 'Unreal' type of mood it set was great but the file was too large to fit on the main page.... so I edited it by taking out the intro and some sound effects. I didnt [sic!] mean to take credit for the song and I didnt [sic!] mean to cause all this trouble. The version I downloaded didnt [sic!] contain any credit info so I didnt [sic!] have any credit to give on the site. That is why I threw my name in there. I am very sorry for the trouble I have caused you."

What a puny excuse.

Now the second, even bigger shit: A tracker named DJ Carbon sold modules by various composers, inlcuding Andreas Viklund, on http://www.mp3.com. Again, a big story was published at MODPlug central. Soon both Carbon's page on mp3.com and his personal homepage were closed because of his illegal activities. Carbon, who later gave an interview to MODPlug central forced by Viklund, claimed that he just wanted to improve the reputation of tracked music among the Internet community in this way. Again, if you believe that, you'll believe anything.

As a consequence tracker musicians plan to form a group called IADAP (International Association of Digital Artists and Producers) that is to protect their rights.

The MODPlug Central site is located at http://www.modplug.com.

- almaatadok^hugi