Team Teamwork, reacting to a copyright infringement claim, has removed the videogame-themed mash-up album Vinyl Fantasy 7 from the website Bandcamp.
Vinyl Fantasy 7 mashes up hip-hop artists like Jay-Z and Ghostface Killah with Nobuo Uematsu’s hit score from the 1997 videogame Final Fantasy VII. Artist “Team Teamwork” is Tim Jacques, a 24-year-old graphic designer from the Boston area.
Jacques doesn’t know who filed the claim against him. “I received the notice with Bandcamp as the proxy,” he told Wired.com by email.
He had been allowing fans to make donations via Bandcamp — a ploy that netted the artist “literally tens of dollars over the last weekend, and over all a little under a hundred.” He wasn’t exactly rolling in the dough.
Still, copyright laws apply whether you’re making money or not. Jacques just assumed that hip-hop artists might be a little more easygoing about sampling. “Mixtapes by their very nature are bootlegs,” he said. “Aside from the whole DJ Drama fiasco a few years ago, the law has been very lenient toward that media.”
Jacques, too, understands that copyright claims are something of a rite of passage among cut-and-paste musicians. “It seems like all the big deal guys, except Girl Talk, have been hit with some kind of legal notice.”
Despite the fact that Bandcamp is no longer hosting his files, Jacques is confident that fans will be able to find his records. “It’s impossible to remove something from the internet,” he says. “So, even if I’m not distributing it, somebody out there probably is.”
The first order of business for Jacques is to find “a way to distribute my music without the site I’ve been using for months.” Then he’ll move on to composing the tunes for his non-game-related project, The Good-ass Remixes Vol. 2.
Note: This story has been corrected from the original version. The original story said that Bandcamp had pulled the album, but Tim Jacques says he pulled it voluntarily. Wired.com regrets the error.
Image courtesy Team Teamwork
