Man, this is scandalous!

‘Many fans came to know [Scientist's] music due to half of his album ‘Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires’ being used on the soundtrack for the popular videogame Grand Theft Auto III. The tracks on the fictitious radio station ‘K-Jah’ are composed entirely of songs from this album. However, Scientist received no royalties for this, and sued Rockstar Games unsuccessfully in a US court. The court ruled that according to precedent a recording mixer was not considered the author of a musical work, and so Rockstar were correct to treat the producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes as the copyright holder of the album.

This ruling could be argued to neglect the fundamental difference between dub-reggae and other kinds of music - after all, the album is marketed as ‘Scientist rids the world of the evil curse of the vampires’: so the publishers and self identified licensors are prepared to attribute authorship to Hopeton Brown when it suits them, but not when it comes to paying him royalties. It can, however, be argued that Scientist was introduced to a much larger audience as a result of the licensing of his album to Rockstar, in which case he may have sold more albums as a result.’

Scientist is a fucking genius, and ‘Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires’ one of the best dub albums recorded. What a scam.

Pick up some great Scientist tunes at It’s Coming Out Of Your Speaker….

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 9:57 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.