Timbaland accused of stealing from a Finnish musician

[Dustie]

Not sure if you've heard about it, but it looks pretty nasty.

from Wikipedia:

In January 2007, several news sources reported that Timbaland was alleged to have plagiarized several elements (both motifs and samples) in the song "Do It" on the 2006 album Loose by Nelly Furtado without giving credit or compensation.[1][2][3][4]
The claimed original track, entitled "Acidjazzed Evening", is a 4 channel Amiga module composed by Finnish demoscener Janne Suni (a.k.a. Tempest). [5] The song won first place in the Oldskool Music competition at Assembly 2000, a demoparty held in Helsinki, Finland in the year 2000. [6] 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.[7]

A video which claims to show proof of the theft was posted to YouTube on January 12, 2007.[8] 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. [9]

full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Ti...oversy#_note-5

Youtube comparison of Do It and the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4KX7SkDe4Q <- this video got almost 300,000 hits already.
Youtube comparison of the original and the ringtone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV2fTEeP6GM

It's a real shame since I liked Nelly's "Do It" a lot, I think it's one of the best tracks on the album "Loose" and I was waiting eagerly for it to become a single and recieve a video. As for the issue itself, I think it's not just "sampling", like many people on the internet respond to the controversy, becouse Timbaland didn't credit or paid royalties to the original author. Yes, there are millions of unauthorized samples out there that people can pick to their compositions, but - even if you don't know who made it, if you conciously decide to use it without bothering to find the author to pay him a credit, you risk that you might get cought one day.

Now, Timbaland should just pay proper royalties to the author, that's my opinion. He didn't know him back when he was making the track, but now he knows who the author is. He got cought. No matter how much struggle would he have to go through to find the author back then, he should have done it - or take the risk of unauthorised use. As we see, he took the easier path.

I'm not for seeing any kind of conflict between Timbaland and Janne Suni, they should settle the case with Timbaland paying him at least a written and spoken credit and an apology.