PPixelation

One of PPixelation's avatars, featuring her signature red character

**PPixelation** is a plagiarist of the chiptune community, infamous for stealing songs from threads on the FamiTracker Forums that had next to no activity, possibly in an attempt to go unnoticed. This went on for around one year, until a member who was well versed within the FT community stumbled upon her SoundCloud account. Initially, he found a single song familiar to him, in which he left a comment calling her out for stealing the song. A few days later, the song was removed from SoundCloud.

In late July, however, his interest in the SoundCloud account was piqued again, at which point he found another stolen track, this one being DimWiddy's boss battle track. Suspecting this to be a recurring event, he investigated further. This led to him discovering her entire SoundCloud account was made up of plagiarized content.

At this point, he decided to publicly call out PPixelation over Twitter, meanwhile members of the FamiTracker.org community scrambled through her Bandcamp and YouTube pages in an attempt to find more stolen songs and reporting any familiar songs, and it turns out she was selling plagiarized content on Bandcamp, to the bewilderment and anger of many users.

Shortly thereafter, PPixelation made a thread on the FamiTracker Forums, apologizing and offering 150% compensation for any artists that got their tracks plagiarized. This resulted in a large but brief spike in popularity for the site, as several members who had abandoned the forums returned to reprimand PPixelation for her actions. PPixelation initially seemed remorseful, having closed down seemingly all of her accounts, and claiming to have donated some of the money made from selling the stolen music to charity.

During this incident, a member of the FT community managed to contact PPixelation about the situation. She reaffirmed her regret over the events, as well as promising to make amends in any way possible. A few days later, she followed up with a message saying she'll "take a break from the internet", which received mixed opinions. Some users suspected she may have been trying to flee from the situation, while others saw it as a normal reaction to her new circumstances.

Later, in the forum thread, a user claiming to be PPixelation's fiance joined the discussion saying that he had broken up with her shortly before the incident. A few other users claiming to be friends and Patreon supporters of PPixelation also joined, expressing shock at the situation. Even further in the thread's development, one of the former Patreon supporters, soulthreads, discovered that PPixelation had not closed her Patreon page: she simply renamed it. This was effectively the final straw for most FamiTracker users; after this incident, PPixelation status as a community pariah was solidified. However, a later exchange that user ollaxe had with one of PPixelation's friends revealed that the account was configured not to receive payments, and that it takes a total of three weeks to have a Patreon account removed.

PPixelation's actions caused a widespread lack of trust in the FamiTracker community, with many members no longer sharing modules for fear of being stolen from.

Since she's taken down most of her pages, it is difficult to find out who PPixileation plagiarized from, at least until her entire discography of stolen tracks is released either by herself or one of her relatives.

## Investigation Efforts

From July 27th to the present day, members of the FamiTracker Discord Server began to search for the original artists of the songs that PPixelation had plagiarized. Days later, a Discord server was created to serve as a central hub to contain all discussion of the investigation. The server was named the **PPixelation Plagiarism Analysis Procedure**. Since then, many members have contributed sources to several of the original works. These sources are being collected in the list linked below.

## Methods

PPixelation mostly stole from the FamiTracker Forums , although a few of them were from YouTube and SoundCloud. The songs were uploaded to her accounts with a changed name, varying levels of EQ applied and sometimes with a lowered bitrate. When stealing songs from multi-song modules, she would usually choose a song another forum member said is their 'favorite', and/or mix two songs together,

 Accounts

### YouTube

PPixelation's YouTube channel was a simple video respository of her stolen chipmusic. It was one of the only sites of hers that was archived.

###  SoundCloud

PPixelation actually has two SoundCloud accounts: one for chiptunes and another, secondary one for possibly other stolen songs. They were both taken down, although PPixelation had to be told to remove the secondary account.

### BandCamp

This account (along with the Patreon account) angered the FamiTracker community the most, since it showed that PPixelation was not only hosting stolen music, but also selling it.

### Patreon

PPixelation has not removed her Patreon account, unlike her other pages, but has simply renamed it to bleck. She receives $10 a month from 2 patrons. In exchange for pledging certain amounts of monthly money to her, PPixelation promises to help patrons learn how to use FamiTracker. Her original page (before it was renamed) contained the ironic phrase, "Feel free to remix or do whatever with it but don't repurpose it.. cause that's stealing kids :^)" which has since been removed.

### Clyp

PPixelation also has a Clyp account, where she has uploaded several incomplete versions of her stolen work, along with allegedly original piano arrangements and 'Daily Doodles'. These audio files have been gathered in an online repository by user 8BitZtuner, the MP3's metadata will be slowly edited once all tracks have been identified, the filenames are kept for archiving purposes.

## References

1. ↑ https://soundcloud.com/dimwiddy
2. ↑ http://famitracker.org/
3. ↑ http://forums.famitracker.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3523
4. ↑ http://forums.famitracker.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3523&start=20#p21366
5. ↑ http://forums.famitracker.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3523&start=40#p21414
6. ↑ https://archive.is/A0Ur4
7. ↑ http://archive.is/Cmiw7
8. ↑ http://forums.famitracker.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3523&start=10#p21343
9. ↑ https://clyp.it/user/1tsegmfl
10. ↑ https://1drv.ms/f/s!AvtI52OneMJFphcnxc0nVsH6x\_3e