Alex Due

Archive for January, 2018

On January 5, 2018 Moby posted a link to the stems of this new song “Like A Motherless Child” on splice.com. The song immediately got me into a vibe and I could not resist creating my own remix which I also posted onto Splice including the stems.

This is my more aggressive and electronic version of Moby’s beautiful song. I kept the tempo, adapted the groovy drums and bass and reused the guitar. For the chorus I felt that my version needed more harmonies which I think fit the female vocals very well. In additional the second chorus trades E minor for G major bringing a lift and increase to the final. The outro tries to meet Moby’s wish to be “almost overly-long”.

As Moby posted his song under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license I published my remix under the same license. But right after I uploaded my remix to SoundCloud where I put all my songs so far, I received a message and an email from SoundCloud informing me that the remix had been removed from my profile. It states:

Our automatic content protection system has detected that one of your tracks might contain copyrighted content.

As a result, your track has been removed from your profile for the time being. Please have a look at the details below and get in touch with us if you believe there’s been a mistake.

As described further in this message there is a way to dispute this automated decision. I explained that the original song was put onto Splice by Moby himself under a CC-BY-NC-SA license as can be clearly seen on Splice and that my song was in line with the license’s terms. SoundCloud “resolved” my dispute only hours later saying that “Unfortunately, your dispute was rejected”.

This is classic collateral damage of overly strict copyright regulations. I assume that SoundCloud has a clause in their terms of service saying they can block content for whatever reason and therefore probably don’t have any reason to justify this. Why would they if they can arbitrarily remove content the site which is theirs. As they might be hold reliable if they kept illegal content on their site it is obvious they rather remove more content than less.

As a result I removed SoundCloud players from my label website, won’t use them anymore on my blog and am going to remove the previously used ones replacing them with players from the Internet Archive.

Nevertheless, I blame SoundCloud as their dispute process does not seem to work in this case which from my point of view could not be any clearer.

The ones who are to blame at the root of the problem are politicians making one-sided laws turning a blind eye on the rights of creative people who do not have any backup of corporations with huge budgets to sue.

As usually free downloads are available on the label website. The downloads include a 96 kHz 24 bit version for audiophiles and the stems in 44.1 kHz 16 bit.

Download MP3: Moby – Like A Motherless Child [Alex Due Remix]

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