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The Green Herring

Musical plagiarism in Freedoom

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Earlier today, while browsing my MIDIs, I was nonplussed to discover a case of plagiarism in Freedoom.

First, click here to listen to Metabolist's MAP28 music for Freedoom, featured in the current version and SVN.

After that, click here to listen to the E4L3 music from the classic (1997) Duke Nukem 3D total conversion, The Gate.

Sound familiar? It should: All Sam did was make the song loop twice and add two instruments on the second loop. And to add insult to injury, he erased the markers identifying the actual composer (Jenna Ramsey,) which included a visible copyright notice ("Copyright (C) 1997 J. M. Ramsey"). It's one thing to steal a copyrighted song, modify it only slightly, and claim it as your own. It's another thing to steal a copyrighted song, modify it only slightly, claim it as your own, and then submit it to a project which is supposed to consist of free material.

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andrewj said:

That page has nothing on it. So what's the worst part again?

Last night it had a ton of music tracks on it, presumably they were all removed after this discovery.

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andrewj said:

That page has nothing on it. So what's the worst part again?


The worst part is that page had 90% of freedoom's music on it. As you can see that music is no longer there.

Freedoom 0.6.4 is also released, now with 90% less music!

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Catoptromancy said:

Freedoom 0.6.4 is also released, now with 90% less music!

90%? Ouch!

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Good job being so fast. Let's not get too upset about how much music we've lost. Most of it sucked anyway :)

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Plus I think there's a use for jute gyte's midi making efforts as suitable replacements. Though I can't say myself, as it's only a suggestion, and my name is not jute gyte.

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Jon said:

Most of it sucked anyway :)

Hehe, the ones that didn't were probably the commercial rips...

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I'm glad somebody brought this up. I knew there was something up, but I wasn't quite sure what it was.

Something else that might be worth mentioning (or not since it's a bit late) MAP21's music also contained an organ riff ripped straight out of a MIDI track from HacX. Can't remember/find out which one it is, though. :(

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Jimmy91 said:

Something else that might be worth mentioning (or not since it's a bit late) MAP21's music also contained an organ riff ripped straight out of a MIDI track from HacX. Can't remember/find out which one it is, though. :(


musics/metabolist/fdoom21.mid, this one?

This is why all his music was removed. It would be very hard/impossible to track down all midis ever made and compare to what was submitted.

andrewj said:

That page has nothing on it. So what's the worst part again?


This is the log of what was on that page.

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/freedoom.git/commit/?id=726620e98808700da74da087cb1cec561df7d46f

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What do we plan to do about this? Perhaps we shall go on a search for some free-licensed music to put in there for now?

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Spleen said:

What do we plan to do about this? Perhaps we shall go on a search for some free-licensed music to put in there for now?


Fire up some midi software and make them. I have already managed to get some tunes out of Anvil and will run it through ModPlug to make the parts sound good.

EDIT> Just remembered ModPlug.

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One of my friends in the debian-games team has advised that you should clean the files out of the VCS history, too, for your own protection. I'm inclined to agree. I don't know off-hand how to achieve this.

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leileilol said:

Plus I think there's a use for jute gyte's midi making efforts as suitable replacements. Though I can't say myself, as it's only a suggestion, and my name is not jute gyte.


Yes. I made an enormous amount of music (42 tracks, 75 minutes) for the now-dead Dave3D that I would be happy to donate to FreeDoom. You can hear it all by going here: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1790.0 Please feel free to give this stuff a home.

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Jon said:

One of my friends in the debian-games team has advised that you should clean the files out of the VCS history, too, for your own protection. I'm inclined to agree. I don't know off-hand how to achieve this.

Admittedly it's a pain that it's in there, but is it really an issue? Unless either the copyright owner or GNU (who are hosting the site) complain, what is the need? It's a shame that this happened and all, but it seems to me that the best thing to do is just document it and move on. Or is there some particular reason why it should be removed?

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We had dismissed cleaning out the SCM history of illegal material for purely convenience factors, although I tend to feel it would be better to remove it altogether.

AFAIK, this entails wiping out the repository completely on the server and forcing people to re-clone the repo, but if it's what must be done to stay legal, so be it...

(And if the FSF complain about illegal resources on their servers, I wouldn't blame them, and we would be hard pressed to find another host to willingly host such material, so yeah, it would be in the best interest to clear it out, I should get on that asap)

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jute said:

Yes. I made an enormous amount of music (42 tracks, 75 minutes) for the now-dead Dave3D that I would be happy to donate to FreeDoom. You can hear it all by going here: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1790.0 Please feel free to give this stuff a home.


Wow, some of these is really nice. :)

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Catoptromancy said:

EDIT> Just remembered ModPlug.

Don't abuse modplug for enhancing midis though. The timing will be ear-hurtingly off and it will rely on the non-Free Microsoft GM32.DLS samples.

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Torn said:

Wow, some of these is really nice. :)


Thanks! I'd love to see it get a home.

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Gone from the download area; up to the various Linux distros to solve the problem on their end. Can't force users to delete old IWADs, so there's nothing left to do.

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jute said:

Yes. I made an enormous amount of music (42 tracks, 75 minutes) for the now-dead Dave3D that I would be happy to donate to FreeDoom. You can hear it all by going here: http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=1790.0 Please feel free to give this stuff a home.


I don't think I will ever be able to understand HOW you made 3 tracks per day. How long did you spend on each one?

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Not very long. Probably 20-30 minutes. They're not very complicated pieces, and the average length is probably under 3 minutes. Also, it's pretty easy to think up boneheaded riffing. It was kind of a fun diversion from music of a more demanding, time-consuming sort that I was doing in college at the time.

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stewboy said:

I don't think I will ever be able to understand HOW you made 3 tracks per day. How long did you spend on each one?

Each one has only four tracks, and it looks like they all came from the same base midi file. :P

To be honest, they all sound a bit "flavorless". Not sure how else to say it... they just don't conjure up anything really vivid in my mind when I listen to them. :( Sorry, but I don't think these belong in FreeDoom.

Music really helps add to the mood of a mapset, and even more so for a total conversion. Though it's really great that jutegyte was willing enough to do the entire soundtrack for a free conversion, and I agree to some extent that a conversion's soundtrack should have some sort of underlying theme (I mean, just look at killer megawads like 'Icarus' and 'Daedalus' by TeamTNT). FreeDoom didn't really have a musical theme to begin with, and to be brutally honest, I don't think jute's have either.

I might be overly picky when it comes to music, though. I had a hell of a time finalizing my Claustrophobia 1024 contributions. :P

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