In June the company Microsoft held an online presentation Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase… One of the highlights of the broadcast is the game’s trailer. Atomic heart from Russian studio Mundfish.
The video used the song “Music has tied us“performed by the group”Mirage“. However, last week the video was removed from the YouTube channel Mundfish at the request of the copyright holder. However, the trailer is still available on the official channel. Xbox…
Head of the studio Robert Bagratuni (he is Maxim Zatsepin) stated that the complaint allegedly did not come from the author of the song and the creator of the Mirage group Andrey Lityagin, and Mundfish has obtained all the necessary rights to use the music and is ready to sue.
“Apparently, these are such echoes of the 90s and raiding, which spilled over into the Internet. This applicant deliberately prevents the use of a musical composition in our trailer, to which we acquired full rights, and we will defend our interests in court,” Bagratuni wrote in Discord…
However, Andrei Lityagin himself spoke this week. He said the talks with Mundfish were like a “joke” that stretched out over two months. As a result, Bagratuni signed a contract with the label behind the composer’s back “National Music Publishing House“(NMI), which could sell a license to rework the song “Music Bound Us” only with the consent of the composer himself.
“Gentlemen, I will make your release a legal nightmare for many years! You at least have already earned a negative reputation for yourself. My question is – was it worth it?” – quoted by the commentary Lityagin portal App2top.ru…
This is not the first scandal around the Mundfish studio. In 2019, several people, on condition of anonymity, stated that the studio allegedly lacks a clear vision of Atomic Heart, and the game itself can be completed in 15 minutes. Mundfish tried to disprove the rumors by inviting only select journalists to showcase the project.
Problems also haunt the song “Music Tied Us”, which is associated with the showdown between Andrei Lityagin, his ex-partners and former participants of the Mirage project. In particular, the composer tried to ban the singer Margarita Sukhankina perform songs of the group that were included in her album “Music has tied us“released in 2019 … on the NMI label.
The key problem is related to the fact that Andrei Lityagin wrote the main hits of “Mirage” in collaboration with the producer of the group Valery Sokolov… Both of them regularly argue with each other through the media, and also sue the performers (often ex-members Natalia Gulkina and Margarita Sukhankina), concert organizers, companies and TV channels for illegal use of songs.
Last week, another round of showdowns between the co-authors just started. According to Sokolov, Litovkin allegedly regularly forgets to whom he generally sold permission to perform the songs of the Mirage group.
“The trademark for the name Mirage, which he declares everywhere, no longer belongs to him, and he still considers himself the main shareholder,” RIA Novosti quotes the words of the songwriter.
Lityagin himself recalls that back in 2018, the court recognized him as the permanent leader of the Mirage group. The composer also frequently sues performers and even wins.
There have been no new comments from Mundfish yet. However, it is possible that the parties simply did not agree on the price, as a result of which the studio turned to NMI. At the same time, no one deleted the Atomic Heart trailer from the Xbox YouTube channel, which is more difficult to hit from Russia.
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