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Composer Says Beijing Olympic Committee Ripped Him Off
By Eliot Van Buskirk EmailAugust 22, 2008 | 10:05:10 AMCategories: Copyright and Copyfight

Beijing Peter Breiner, who arranged more than 200 national anthems for the 2004 Olympics, has accused the Beijing Olympic Committee of stealing those works for this year's Games. He says he is "100 percent sure" that his arrangements are being played at medal ceremonies -- and the Washington Post's culture critic couldn't agree more.

"First, the Slovak orchestra is much better than the Beijing orchestra (pictured above), which suffers from shrill upper-string sound," writes Philip Kennicott, of the Post. "More to the point, the Beijing orchestra is using Breiner's ideas so blatantly that it would be accused of plagiarism if its arrangers submitted their orchestration as original work in any respectable conservatory. It isn't just the rockets' red glare: Breiner's basic conception of the whole piece has been copied."

This is not the only embarrassing accusation that has dogged event organizers in Beijing. The nine-year-old girl who performed during the opening ceremony was revealed to have lip-synced to a recording of a slightly less photogenic seven-year-old, at least one fake building has been spotted and part of the brilliant firework display that appeared outside the stadium was actually a computer simulation that took a year to create.

As for these disputed national anthem arrangements, China says it came up with them on its own. "We have not heard of Naxos (Rights International, Breiner's publisher, which has apparently attempted to discuss the issue with the committee)," said Beijing Olympics deputy director of communications Sun Weide to the Washington Post via email.

"All the anthems and songs used at the Beijing Games were orchestrated by Chinese musicians."

Weide's response deftly dodges the question of who arranged the parts. "Orchestrated" typically means "arranged," but of course it would have been impossible for each musician in the orchestra to have written his or her own part. Judging from the certitude exhibited by the Washington Post, what Weide means is that Chinese musicians recorded their own parts, as opposed to having written them.

And since publishing rights are at stake here, it doesn't matter who recorded the parts; what matters is the parts themselves, which appear to have been blatantly cribbed from Breiner's arrangements. The anthems are in the public domain, but Breiner's arrangements are private property.

"My arrangements of public-domain anthems are actually original compositions from a legal point of view," said the Czechoslovakian native to the Post from New York, "which means if someone wants to record them, they have to purchase the material."

It would appear that the Beijing Olympic Committee has infringed his copyright on a massive scale, since national anthems are played at each medal ceremony. An estimated 3 billion people worldwide are tuning in to the games via television.