Someone is profiting from my arrangements without credit...

[SlowPokemon]

https://open.spotify.com/album/6fWQdn10mutvilDBkeeVCZ

This album, also on iTunes, Apple Music, and Amazon, is basically our entire Professor Layton section. A couple of the tracks which have official piano book arrangements are not from NSM, but the majority are (seriously, there's no way that they would randomly choose the same exact few sheets we have, and there's no way that tracks like the London Life title and Monte d'Or would be arranged exactly the way my versions on the site are by coincidence). Should I be allowed to feel angry about this? Or once it's up on our site is that fair game for anyone to profit from without credit? I'm feeling really conflicted.

In case it matters, the only others affected by this are Bloop, Bubbles, and PitTan.

It seems like this person has lots of video game albums, so I guess it's likely this isn't the only franchise.

Blah.

[Brassman388]

I think this would be a good time to talk about protecting our creative rights as arrangers.

Technically, what we do is under creative commons, but there is some work that, if we could pay for it, that we could maybe have some copyright protections for our music?

I'm not worried too much with iTunes or Apple music, or Spotify because they're not going to payout that much for music, as other artists can attest to. But Amazon is a whole nother story. One that I can't rhetorically speak on until I do some research.

Anyone else have thoughts?

[Rusivaei]

I want to be involved in providing these chunks for those who are looking for.

[Brassman388]

So far he goes by two names.

daigoro789, and Evren Pirefendi.

More to come.

[BlackDragonSlayer]

If there's a way you can report them to Spotify (and other sites), I'd suggest doing that. If they're doing what they're doing without giving any credit (asking permission would be nice, though not required), then that's stealing (and implying through omission that the arrangements they're doing were made by them), whether NSM's content is free or not.

[Brassman388]

We need copyright protection to claim anything legal.

Edit: not to mention that if he doesn't have licenses for each of those songs or each album, he's violating so many copyright laws.

[AmpharosAndy]

I want to be involved in providing these chunks for those who are looking for.

don't we all

inspirational

[Pianist Da Sootopolis]

It's also important to remember that anything you want to copyright is already-copyrighted music from the people who wrote the music to begin with. I'm not defending this guy stealing Slow's stuff obviously, just that I don't know how much legal grounding we have to stand on given that this entire site is more or less illegal.

[SlowPokemon]

Well, yes, but we aren't making money from it, which is what bothers me...

[Brassman388]

The best thing you can do right now is send in a formal complaint explaining that he is also infringing on copyright.

That, and maybe confront him personally about the matter.

Legally, we have no rights because, aside from us working from copyrighted work, we ourselves do not have copyright claims to our work.

Ultimately, if it bothers you that people have the the will to plagiarize your work, then I would suggest removing it from NSM. That being the extreme case.

[AmpharosAndy]

or put your own album up hehe