China can't seem to do anything right. Despite the success of the Beijing Olympic Games, medals won and dives dived, people scarcely won't shut up about Tibet, smogginess and human rights. Well, there's a new ailment to add together to the list, and it's the most outlandish yet. Remember the national anthems played during the Games? Well, they were nicked, a Czech composer has alleged.
In 2004, Peter Breiner arranged more than 200 national anthems for use at the Athens Olympic Games. Though some might think that a song's a song, in copyright terms an agreement is an original put to work. What's more, Breiner sawed-off these anthems, in some cases, to their minute-long essences, or brought out different classifiable elements.
Watching medal ceremonies in Beijing, Breiner and several other close listeners noticed a striking resemblance between the Chinese arrangements and Breiner's 2004 compositions. Or, more cuttingly, Breiner is "100% positive" that the Beijing Olympic Committee is victimisation his work without ascription, permission or compensation, he told the Washington Post.
Breiner's Athens anthems were released as an eight-volume set by the well-known Naxos label. And, indeed, Breiner and Naxos offered to license these recordings to the Beijing Olympics. "They responded that they would make their own recordings with a Chinese orchestra," Breiner told the Post.
The difficulty is, on that point are quirks to Breiner's arrangements that are distinctive. His withdraw on the American hymn, The Star-Spangled Banner, wound up considerable disputation in 2004, with a Wall Street Journal writer calling it a "Europe-friendly version of the anthem" that dulls "the notion of the US as a chest-thumping, butt-kicking, jingoistic powerhouse".
And when it comes to the Beijing version of that same anthem, "Breiner's basic conception of the unhurt piece [had] been copied," the Post alleges. "The brass opening, the increase of strings when the opening melody repeats, the inclusion of complex bass lines in Measures 14 and 28, and the use of an antiquated little cadency at the end of several phrases [were] all very particular to Breiner's original."
Olympic organisers denied the allegations. "We have non heard of Naxos," Sun Weide, lieutenant director for communications for the Beijing Olympics, told the Post. "All the anthems and songs put-upon at the Beijing Games were orchestrated by Chinese musicians."
In other conversations with Breiner and Naxos, the Chinese gave different explanations for the arrangements' origins. Beijing aforementioned that they had been sent copies by the International Olympic Committee, or had just "found them on the internet", Naxos president Klaus Heymann said.
Certainly, Olympic government may suffer just hired a Chinese musician to transcribe Breiner's arrangements from CD. But the legal twists and turns are complicated indeed. Experts say that the case would have to be fought in China, a area that does not exactly have a reputation for strictly enforced copyright constabulary.
Still, Breiner is firm in his position. "My arrangements of public-domain anthems are original compositions from a sound point of view," he told the post. "Which means if someone wants to record them, they have to purchase the material."
Maybe he can sleeve wrestle them for it.
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