The copyrights of music used for next year’s Beijing Olympic Games will be protected by the organizers, according to a protection plan set out by BOCOG) and the Music Copyright Society of China.

According to the plan, BOCOG will pay for music used at the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, cultural activities at the venues and during the medal presentation ceremonies, if the copyright belongs to others.

It is estimated the Beijing Olympic Games will include nearly 10,000 music works.

Liu Yan, vice-director of the BOCOG legal affairs department, said, ‘BOCOG has made a great effort in the area of intellectual property rights protection and protecting copyright is an important part of this.

‘There will be a large number and variety of musical works used at the Olympic Games, which makes our task more difficult. We have discussed this with the MCSC for nearly a year.’

BOCOG has been commissioning songs for the Olympic Games since 2003 and has designated MCSC to manage copyright issues.
Source: China Daily

A group of four primary school children from Tianjin, 150-kilometer southeast to Beijing, are the latest to present their composition to the Beijing Olympic office. The students called themselves 20088′, as all four are going to be eight years-old next year.

The four children were chosen by their teacher Li Hongyu from a pool of 400 candidates from a local club in Tianjin.

The parents of the members of the youngest electronic band in China said the trainer assured them their children would have enough time to study as well as work on their song. If anyone ended up with poor marks, the students would have to withdraw from entering.

The Organizing Committee for the Beijing Olympic Games made the call for entries before March 2008. Then it will decide on the themes songs for both the Beijing Games and Paralympics, a song for the volunteers, the torch relay, and the music for awards ceremonies.

American Giorgio Moroder, the theme song composer for the 1984, 1988 Olympic Games and the 1990 World Cup submitted his work earlier in May after working with Chinese pianist Kong Xiangdong.

Kong Xiangdong said, ‘Our composition will make it easy for people to hum the song after listening to it three times so that everyone can participate.’

Former Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing has also tried his hand after a music school teacher composed a tune for his poem on the Beijing Olympics.

In his poem, One World One Dream, Li writes, ‘Let war fires end here/ Let feud reconciled here/ Let peace and friendship extending from here/ Let the sun shines with seven-color light’.

Probably reads better in the original.
Source: China Daily