An online forum on music, aeguitar.org, suddenly raised its doubt about Ngu Cung, a famous rock band in Vietnam that may have pirated foreign music.

Ngu Cung rock band.

On March 12 the forum offered two pieces of evidence. First, Ngu Cung’s “Long Nguc Toi” (Dark Rib-Cage) is similar to “Mesa boogie mark iv + gibson + echoplex + Ebow” by a Russian man with nickname gibsonworlddemise while “365.000” is very similar to Muse’s “Stockholm Syndrome”.

A member nicknamed “Truck” emailed gibsonworlddemise to ask about the “Mesa boogie mark iv + gibson + echoplex + Ebow” video clip posted by gibsonworlddemise on YouTube on June 19 2008 and sent him the link to Ngu Cung’s “Dark Rib-Cage” to ask which is the original work.

This is the answer from gibsonworlddemise: “Yes, 100 percent of that melody is mine. This band obviously pirated my music. They didn’t add anything, they just mimicked my solo to make their own work.”

After that, the forum continued to post other evidence to show that Ngu Cung’s “Be U” for Honda’s advertisement is similar to Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend”, its “Outtro” copies Tool’s “The Pot”, “Live Wave” is a rip-off of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Around the World” and Ngu Cung’s top hit “Cuop Vo” is an imitation of Steve Morse’s “Name-Dropping.”

According to forum participants, up to half the songs on Ngu Cung’s “365.000” album are “problematic” because some pieces of music are copied from foreign works.

By March 16, the pages about Ngu Cung’s piracy numbered 18, the highest number so far on aeguitar forum.

This topic is heating up on other big music forums in Vietnam like rockpassion, hehemetal, rocktn, ttvnol, arsenal, and linkhay.

The band’s representative, Bui Thanh Ha, told Tuoi Tre on March 16 that the band temporarily had no explanation for the observations made on these forums and that it was confident of the originality of its works. Ha explained that, like many other bands, Ngu Cung has many idols and reflects their influence.

On its website, ngucung.com, the band lists influences like Dream Theater, Pink Floyd, Tool and Ozzy Osbourne, but most of the suspected plagiarized songs are not from those bands, except “Outtro’s” similarity to “The Pot”.

Until now, after many suspicions and accusations of music piracy in Vietnam, there is still no set rules to define and prevent pirating or plagiarizing a song.

VietNamNet/Tuoi Tre