Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Timbaland's Response To The "DO IT" Controversy










Watch it..HATERS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATkHbfbQAc4

26 comments:

jon said...

tim = that dude

Anonymous said...

Well, thanks for finally confirming that he did STEAL the tune! ;-)
His lawyers are probably not too happy about that interview, hehe...

"I didn't know what's free and what's not" - now that's a funny defense. Can i also use that when i leech your tunes from P2P, Timbo?
If you're too busy to find and pay the guy you ripped from (hint: Enter the name "Glenn Rune Gallefoss" that SIDplay shows you into Google, third hit is a page with a valid email address!), i guess I'm just too busy to pay for your tunes, too! ;-)
"I'm too busy" and "I didn't know" are defenses that are seriously gonna fly in court i bet... LOL!...

And what's that BS about "videogames"? It's not from a videogame, and even if it was: Does that mean it's free for the taking? Why? Because according to some twisted Timbo-logic all videogame music is public domain by default?

Anonymous said...

I'm not a hater or anything, but what? I hope Tim just didn't say it's ok to rip off video game music. :/

Anonymous said...

Comment are censored on that YouTube clip. So a copy of the clip has been posted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTvY3wZrHrQ

Anonymous said...

Hi.

Is this supposed to make us "haters" hate him less? He admits flat out that he doesen't give a fuck about other composers rights, he admits that it's illegal and that he doesen't bother to clear samples and just wait and see if someone reacts to it. Also, he acts like a fucking immature cunt the way he speaks about it.

It really puzzles me if you still can't see that he has done someting wrong. But I guess that's what being a fan(atic) is all about.

Cheers!

(and yes, I know you probably won't allow this message on the board. I guess that's why there are only one comment there now as well, since all the replies but that one has been by people who see who wrongly he has acted. If you decide to post this though, feel free to remove this part. Or leave it intact in order to prove me wrong in what I'm thinking here.)

Roman Chlebec said...

He is clueless. The "sample" he used was arranged by a C64 scene musician called Glenn Rune Gallefoss (he is from Norway) and it was never used in a game. The only place where he could take it from was High Voltage Sid Collection which is a music collection featuring about 30 thousands of music for Commodore C64 almost all *copyrighted*. As for the musical arrange of "Do It". It's not just a sample. It's a rip-off the original composition by Janne Suni (that's the finish guy yeah). He haven't just used some small sample. He took the whole music, fiddled with it a little and released it as his. But that's not sampling. That's stealing.

Anonymous said...

Here's the transcript:
http://www.zxdemo.org/extra/timbaland_radio_transcript.txt

So ok, timbaland music is a no go for me now, then.

A simple sorry, I did wrong in taking without asking would have done *sigh*

Money and fame corrupts.

MoreThanJustAFan said...

actually hun I have a job so whatever comments build up during the day get posted at night...so that is why there was only 1 comment. I am not denying anyone their freedom of speach as long as they arent disrespecting me :-)

Roman Chlebec said...

Morethanjustafan: Thanx for being fair. You earned all my respect.

Roman

Anonymous said...

Timbaland is great, I love what he did to the song and the original would have no chance of commercial success. However. He didn't clear his rip of the sample or the song (part of the sung melody is straight ripped too, it's more than just a sample.) I don't think this makes him a bad person, although he's a bit of a hater of someone who helped him make a nice chunk of cash. What's most annoying is that everyone who loves Timbaland can't say "ok, Timbaland, you is great, but this ain't cool." Instead he's some sort of golden child and could get away with murder because of your starry-eyed wonder.

Anonymous said...

He's not saying it was from a "video game", he's saying it was from a "video game idiot".

Timbaland is not the sharpest knife, that's for sure.

MoreThanJustAFan said...

Hmm...to the comment b4 the last one, I am sure that wasn't directed @ me. If so, then I suppose you must not know that I know Timbaland...so sweety I don't get "starry eyed"...

Roman Chlebec said...

It doesn't really matter how clearly something is explained, people from different scene don't understand it. Still after I have read the beatclub forum I would like to add the last thing to all this controversy.

First an introduction of myself. I'm a c64 scene organiser, a news server maintainer. C64 scene sonsists of musicians, graphicians and programmers of demos. They are artists and although they use this old computer, they aren't videogame freaks. They just use this hardware to brinng out their thougts to the limited audience.

The musicians in this scene (I'm one of them) are composing hundreds of songs a year. The 3 channel analogue synthetizer that C64 has inbuild is capable of producing fat beats and really interesting sounds. It's not a videogame chiop. It's a powerful INSTRUMENT. They are doing it with more or less professional software with a lot of interesting features for a musician. GRG produces one of the best arranges in this scene. Full of ornaments and groovy beats. It's not a coincidence that someone from the mainstream could like his stuff. GRG IS a musician. A very good one.

Timbaland has a SIDSTATION (it's visible on photos from his studio). SIDSTATION is a box without keyboard using the same analogue synthetiser CHIP that is used in C64. This sidstation doesn't come with inbuild demo music or anything like that. It's just a machine with various buttons and potentiometers capable of producing simple signals from the chip. What he had to do was to LOAD the GRG's tune into the some sort of player and play it through the SIDSTATION. Every tune of this kind that is available on internet is provided with all the necessary credits to identify the author of the composition. The person who was operating the player must have known that this tune was composed by someone. Why I'm explaining this? It's because some people say that it was a demotune from synthetiser, but it's not possible. SIDSTATION doesn't come up with inbuild demotunes. You can just use it for playing tunes with it. And that's what happened. Someone played a tune with sidstation sampled the whole song and you know the rest.

There is at least 30000 thousands of such tunes in the HVSC library. About 30 of them I composed myself. All of the tunes are properly credited. So next time someone is going to use SIDSTATION to play those tunes and make samples of them, please read the FAQ accompained with the collection, or check the credits data in the player for the copyright owner names. We will avoid this kind of clashes of the scenes.

I don't mention author of the original music - Janne Suni. Which should get all the credit for composing the original score in the first place. But that would be another long text explaining how Amiga music scene works ;-))

Okay. So we might look like nerds to you. But are we? Look. I'm 30. I have wife and daughter, a 100 square meter flat, car, fat amplifier and speakers and play fat beats whenever I feel like teasing my neigbours. I love hip-hop scene (Although I mostly get into the major hits that's played everywhere). And yeah, I'm an amateur musician.. using SID synthetizer to produce music. When I get time. The world is full of different art scenes. Some are major thing. Some were major thing. Some are just going to be major thing. We share one common goal.. we are trying to entertain ourselves and have fun.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I'm a hater...of downright lying and ripping people off. The interview is just proof that he knows what he did and couldn't give two shits about it. What Timbaland considers sampling and stealing really makes no difference here. He just took a song and laid a new drum beat and vocals on it. Court battles have been lost for less obvious rips.

Now that we've heard his side, mainly that he admits ripping another artist off and didn't really care either, we can say that the evidence is conclusive.

This whole situation is pretty ironic considering he's been on a huff about other artists stealing his sound. Not only is this sort of behavior disrespectful to Tempest and GRG, it's also disrespectful to the fans of both Timbaland and Nelly Furtado.

Anonymous said...

Many people (like me) have discussed about sampling and copyrights without studying any facts .

I think it is good to read BBC's arcticle about sampling and clearing. I found it instructive.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/onemusic/legal/samplep01.shtml

Anonymous said...

From BBC site "Altering the sample (speeding it up or adding a few effects) does not get you out of clearing it "

Quite interesting.
Listen bassline from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W_tiuJbvLk&mode=related&search=

Then listen bassline(from about 0:45s)
http://maz.vox.com/library/audio/6a00c22522fe4b604a00c225231611604a.html

Anonymous said...

Maybe it's not sampled but the same instrument is used in both songs.

The bass is quite simple and the melody isn't exactly same.

Anonymous said...

Yes, this is beating a dead horse, but a more accurate comparison of the tunes "Acidjazzed Evening" and "Do It" is available at YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2JjPFd7Jr8

Note the smooth tones at "random" places in the end of the comparison, they would never in a million years be there in the same places unless the tune was sampled from GRG's c64 version. (this is old information, but has not been nicely presented in audio form before)

Also demonstrated is how you can extract the c64 theme by simply eliminating the center channel of "Do It".

I think it is about time Timbaland stopped using profanities describing how ridiculous Janne Suni and Glenn R. Gallefoss is and settle the dispute.

Anonymous said...

so it's perfectly ok for a big label artist to sample an indie artist without crediting, but it's NOT okay if an indie artist samples a big label artist.

interesting.

MoreThanJustAFan said...

smh @ the repetativeness

no one is saying this :
"Yeah, he influenced this and that", "He has more money than Tempest, he's more important" out.


We are simply saying we don't believe he "stole" anything.

So, all this is is going to be opposing opinions. it has nothing to do with who has more money....well maybe to you all it does. Sounds like that's all you see. "Timbaland has money, he should pay"

I guarantee you if that C.D. flopped dramatically, and it didn't sell at all...none of you would be complaining. When the ring tone dropped, nobody said a thing. When Nelly's album dropped...nobody said anything until she went platnum. All of these situations and more make it look real suspicious to us...

Anonymous said...

According Tempest (http://www.fairlight.fi/tempest/acidjazzed_evening/) he has been using the services of a law firm since September 2006. So this is not a new thing.

In Finland, Nelly Furtado's Loose was released in June 2006. So I think actions has been started quite soon after unauthorized sampling was noticed.

I think that the ring tone thing was discovered after some people started to investigate the case on Internet.

By the way. The onirignal SID file (Acid_Jazz.sid) contains integrated copyright information.

You always have to clear the samples of your song. Doing it before releasing the track is much easier and cheaper.

Anonymous said...

Timbachick: I assure you would have heard complaints even if the CD hadn't generated money. In fact what triggered the story, from going from smallish to large was a thread about another ripoff affair, where a band had started collecting chip music and put their (really bad) lyrics on top of it, I doubt that they had made much money out of it, but they had at least appearances at festivals.

In that case their entire catalogue of songs consisted of stolen music, I'm not too familiar with that story, but from what I've heard some of their live performances has at least been canceled by now and most likely that band will be destroyed by their affair, but then again their rippoff was far worse than Timbaland's.

http://nl_hq.micromusic.net/stolengoods/ - Page with Fitts For Fight stolen music.

And there has been other cases of "composers" just downloading their songs from the net and claiming authorship in the past, but with large producers things are different, here you can't just call the artist, publisher, webhost or music depository and say that the artist steals stuff, as you would do with a small time musician, since there is too much money for a large publisher and artist to just do the decent thing, and also the fans of Furtado and Timbaland needs to know what kind of shortcuts is taken in the production. And thus the need for bringing the theft to public attention, which probably was a good choice now when Timbaland are publicly trying to discredit Janne Suni and Glenn R. Gallefoss, as there now are at least some people who have actually heard the comparison of the songs and can dismiss Timbalands attempt to discredit the composers as bullshit.

And there really is no "what if" left in the "what if Timbaland used Acidjazzed Evening in Do It". Timbaland has more or less said he sampled the song and didn't clear the sample in the radio interview linked on this page and the recently uploaded comparison of the songs on YouTube probably could serve as conclusive evidence in a court of law. There really should be no doubt left even for people thinking the nicest things about Timbaland.

Have you heard the new comparison, Timbachick?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2JjPFd7Jr8

Anonymous said...

Yes, we've had cases like these before. One of the bigger ones is from a band called Planet X. And yes, the demoscene _did_ care, even though money wasn't involved:
http://mikrobitti.fi/~jukkak/jay/index.html

This honestly has nothing to do with Timbaland's money to be honest. It's about credit. Something, which neither Tempest nor GRG got. And scratch the whole "neither did XYZ get credit when Timbaland sampled them". That doesn't make it any more right. Had he given the appropriate credit, he might even have new fans from the demoscene for adopting the SID sound.

While Timbaland may have a point that "stealing" is inaccurate in describing what happened, there's no doubt that plagiarism did happen. Even Timbaland himself admits to this with his poor explanation of "sampling".

Oh, and that Swedish Scener's video is good stuff. It pretty much cinches the whole problem. Do we have any reason to believe that Timbaland didn't just take the song without bothering to spend 5 seconds looking at the tags in the .SID that was used in "Block Party" and "Do It"? After all, we already have Timbaland basically admitting it.

Roman Chlebec said...

"When the ring tone dropped, nobody said a thing. When Nelly's album dropped...nobody said anything until she went platnum"

According to a person who said (discovered) the "uncleared sample". It was discovered in the middle of the 2006. The person who discovered it was also a C64 scener. . Problem was that due to sort of "hesitation" the information leaked out and started to live it's own wild and unpredictable life. That's where we are now. I hope, next time this kind of situations will be settled more quitely and faster. I think problem with ringote was, that it was harder to spot. I don't think sceners are kind of the "target group" for ringtone sellers.

I'm somehow reconcilled with what happened, but I still have problem to accept 2 things. 1. The blatant miscrediting of the ringotone authorship. 2. Calling author of the sampled arrange (Glenn Rune Gallefoss) who never ever told anything insulting against Timbaland "a videogame idiot" and "freaking jerk". If I caleed the 2 mentioned issues -unfortunate- that would be an extremely euphemistic euphemism.

Anonymous said...

I just would like to point a little thing concerning Ringtone:

Demoscene seems to be more of a european scene, and people involved (Glen Rune Gallefoss and Janne Suni) are both europeans. Ringtone was exclusive to North American (USA) market. That is probably why it wasn't discovered earlier.

Anonymous said...

Timbaland has many responsibilities, esp. to his fans.. (record labels and to other musicians) . IF he samples anything, to clear the samples,as do I, one rule for all.

Generally , chasing such a case WOULD cost money, scare tactic.. Me, I would persue for damages + costs IF anyone sampled my work. On the same token I would clear all samples I use myself. I would be a hypocrite if I didn't.

As for being insulting on a certain radio interview and BLATENTLY saying it was from a game, then not saying what game means something is rather "odd". In my eyes it's not from a game.