Copyright Disputes
In mid-2008, Crystal Castles were involved in two controversies related to artwork permissions and samples in their earliest unreleased songs. Pitchfork Media and the Torontoist blog published stories about Crystal Castles' use of Trevor Brown's artwork without his permission. The image, depicting a black-eyed Madonna, was used by the band on merchandise. The issue was resolved after the band bought the rights to use the image from Brown.
In one of Kath's earliest, unreleased demos, he incorporated a sample without permission; the track was uploaded on the MySpace page of the label, Lies Records, without credit to the original sampled song. The track, "Insectica (CC vs Lo-Bat Version)", uses clips chopped out of a song by Lo-bat called "My Little Droid Needs a Hand", released under a Creative Commons license. Another track called "Love and Caring", samples the kick and snare from Covox's "Sunday."
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