Any Colour You Like / Eyesix / Jason Dowd plagiarised several artists, in particular from the Twoism community, and made some money by selling their work after renaming the tracks, but also by releasing other artists on his Eyesix label without sending the money to them.
How do we adapt the database in this case? Is a plagiarised release still a release, in which the recordings have a relationship to the original recordings? I could not find anything in the documentation.
So far, I have just added a disambiguation to the artist page, which is far from ideal, or even not recommended. How come we don’t have an annotation for artists? That would be the perfect place for that kind of info (especially since this person will most probably never have a dedicated Wikipedia article).
Releases can of course have an annotation with info about what was plagiarised and who created the original recording.
Moving forward, do you think AcousticBrainz could have some potential to allow e.g. Bandcamp to analyse tracks during the upload and see if it matches existing tracks on their platform, in order to identify potential plagiarism?
The artist / label in question released these in their entirety with different titles. The AcoustID signatures match various artists from around the net. The songs were lifted, repackaged, and sold on Eyesix’s Bandcamp page. I know because I bought the discography several times, and have been able to identify several of the tracks via perfect AcoustID matches.
This isn’t a case of covers, this is a case of rebranding other folks work, repackaging it, and reselling it as one’s own.
Are you 100% sure they are the same tracks? Because I know AcoustID has some problems differentiating between instrumental/karaoke versions of the same track, so theoretically it could also have similar issues with cover versions. It’s noted in the documentation here: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/AcoustID. I’m not saying you’re not correct here, but want to be sure just in case.
We do have it but, contrary to releases (newer system integrated in entity edit page), there is a dedicated edit page (older system).
Click Add annotation in the sidebar.
I can’t see why not. I would probably still specify in the annotation (for each release) what happened, probably, to explain why the recordings are shared and whatnot.
Plagiarised releases should be in the original release groups.
Plagiarised recordings should be merged with original recordings. (Since they’re the same recordings, just released under a different name and with a different artist credits, which is captured on the track/release level.)
As far as I can tell from the links, they aren’t a 1:1 match, more like the guy made their own “compilations” from many of the original artists’ releases. So as nice as it would be to do this and avoid the “artist” having anything in their discography, I guess it can’t be done.
The plagiarist took the tracks, only renamed them, released them in different combinations under his artist name. No mention of the original artist, no mention of covering anything.
I don’t think that applies for plagiarism. The purpose and the method are different. Bootlegs are compilations or first releases of material not authorised by the original artist but with the artist credited properly, be it to make unreleased material available to the fans and/or to make a profit. There is no intention to attribute the authorship to oneself.
I mean within the context of the MusicBrainz scheme, it is classifiable as a bootleg.
The albums in question should be marked as bootleg, and the appropriate artists should be credited. Then in the disambiguation and annotation the plagiarism issue should me described.
Do you think the tracks and the album should have the “artist as credited” as the name of the plagiarist?
In the case of Sunrise Projector, that could make sense as all tracks are by Cities of Earth, therefore it would appear in Cities of Earth’s discography as a bootleg with “artist as credited” as the plagiarist. But most other bootlegs by Any Colour You Like are compilations of tracks by different artists. So should those releases have “artist as credited” as ACYL, but “artist in MusicBrainz” as Various Artists?
