I was over on remix64’s forums when I caught a nice little nugget from forum administrator Chris Abbott. Apparently Timbaland’s record company has settled with Janne Suni’s lawyers. Suni’s website confirms his case has come to a close.
now both parties are trying to avoid giving GRG any recognition, credit
or share.
case. I know lawyers are lawyers, but the morally correct thing to have
done was to join forces with GRG and get joint lawyers.
-Chris
Recap of the initial events:
track “Do It”. He is alleged to have plagiarized several elements (both
motifs and samples) in the song without giving credit or compensation.[13][14]
The alleged original track, titled “Acidjazzed Evening”, is a chiptune-style 4-channel Amiga module composed by Finnish demoscener Janne Suni (a.k.a. Tempest). The song won first place in the Oldskool Music competition at Assembly 2000, a demoparty held in Helsinki, Finland held in the year 2000. According to Scene.org,
the song was uploaded to their servers the same year, long before the
release of the song by Furtado. The song was later remixed (with Suni’s
permission) by Norwegian Glenn Rune Gallefoss (a.k.a. GRG) for the Commodore 64 in SID format
– this is the version which was later allegedly sampled for “Do It”. It
was added to the High Voltage SID Collection on December 21, 2002.
A video which claims to show proof of the theft was posted to YouTube on January 12, 2007.[15] Another video was posted to YouTube on January 14, 2007,
claiming Timbaland also stole the tune a year earlier for the ringtone
“Block Party”, one of several that were sold in the United States in
2005. A YouTube video comparing all the related songs was posted on
February 13.
Since Timbaland has been accused of directly ripping off GRG’s cover of a song Suni composed back in 2000, many NEW rips have come to up as well:
From Wikipedia:
allegations as ‘Do It’. ‘Wait for You’ is told to be plagiarized from a
Turkish folk music song ‘Allah Allah Desem Gelsem’ by Muhlis Akarsu,
famous folk music singer. It is believed that the Bağlama
(a kind of traditional instrument) sample is used in Nelly’s song by
Timbaland illegaly. A video comparing the two songs was posted on
Youtube. [17]
The owner of the record group of Muhlis Akarsu has referred to IFPI about the issue.
However, there are several other songs where it is believed that
Timbaland has illegally sampled from them. A video posted on Youtube
claims to show proof that Jay-Z’s song Big Pimpin has stolen samples from Abdel Halim Hafez’s song “Khosara” and Aaliyah‘s songs “Don’t Know What To Tell Ya” and “More Than A Woman” have the whole background from Warda’s Batwanness Bik and Mayada El Hennawi’s Alouli Ensa respectively.[18]
Another posted video shows similarities between Utada Hikaru’s Exodus ’04 and Aitha Al Menhali’s Meshkeltek.[19]
Yet another video shows how similar are the songs Ne-Yo and Fabulous’ Makes Me Better and Sherine’s Aal Saaban Aleh.
The common point of these videos is that Timbaland took big parts of
the songs without making big alterations and without giving credit to
the artists.[20]