Vindication is mine!

As you may have noticed I may or may not have forgotten about posting here. After ranting on Facebook, Simon was kind enough to remind me. (The title works only if you do it in a Stewie Griffin voice, otherwise it's just sort of ok).




My dislike of Crystal Castles, mis-appropriation of art gets all mixed in with my love of the internet and calling people out.

So Crystal Castles gets busted appropriating another artist's music. In this day and age, is that really newsworthy? Yes and no. I am all for re-contextualizing works, and more often that not people's influences/sampling are worn fully on their sleeve (Girl Talk being a huge example, the whole b-more scene, Obey/Shepard Fairy, etc).

So what the dilly?

• One "underground" artist is stealing from another underground, which is pretty shady in and of itself; one has some measure of commercial success over the other.


• CC has stated in interviews they have no real interest in the Chiptune scene (despite their sonic landscape being so lo-fi, but that's neither here nor there) that their sampling source is hugely involved in.


• This isn't the first time they've gotten busted for stealing another artist's IP

Again, why is this a huge deal?

Where large companies/artists/etc release their works it's copyrighted by the owner. They have huge legal teams to bust you the fuck down when you steal from them. Independent artists, not so much.

This is where Creative Commons comes in. It allows artists/IP holders who want to share their work freely on the internet for anyone to use and re-use, albeit with some licensing regulations and protection for their works. It allows an amazing flow of creativity back and forth which is awesome and fun but in the end it only works if everyone follows the rules and you'd think the rules are pretty easy to follow. It boils down to: I am going to say what you can and cannot do with my creative output and as a reasonable human being interested in furthering cultural endeavours you should respect it.

Example: I am releasing my MP3/screen play/movie online, you are totally allowed to download it and muck around with it all you want but you HAVE to do the following....

The following can be anything as simple as "please say where your original source material came from" to "attribute me, ask for my explicit permission, do not make an money off it, if you do anything you HAVE to put it online with the exact same Creative Commons provisions I had set forth for my source material."

It does not give you carte blanche to ignore the rules and do whatever the fuck you want with it.

Anyways, maybe it's sour grapes I am just being a curmudgeon.

Actually fuck that. Seriously WTF dudes?

More info;

Exclaim's Coverage

Create Digital Music's very indepth description of everything I just ranted about

8-Bit Collectives 32-page forum topic on the matter