Did Beijing Olympics Steal the American Anthem?

There have been many controversies surrounding the operations of the Beijing Olympics. The latest came from this morning's NPR:

The source of the American national anthem being played at the Beijing Olympics during medal ceremonies is in question. Peter Breiner wasn't watching the Games until his friends starting calling to say, "That sounds like your arrangement." It does. Especially the "Rockets Red Glare" section — an unusually soft string rendition that brought some controversy when it was used in Athens in 2004.He got paid for that rendition in 2004. Now Mr. Breiner says he's "100-percent positive" that the Chinese borrowed it from his work. In an email to The Washington Post, the Chinese insist they came up with the arrangement themselves.

The Washington Post has a lengthier report on the same issue, in which it quoted the email as saying "All the anthems and songs used at the Beijing Games were orchestrated by Chinese musicians." It did not appear to address the issue of arrangement.

The Washington Post article expressed pessimism in resolving this issue properly, noting that China "is not a place known for its strict enforcement of copyrights."

A Fraud Buster Who Steals

Yang Yushen (杨玉圣), a professor at the University of Political Sciences and Law and a member of the Scholar Integrity Committee (学风建设委员会) in the Ministry of Education, could be a comrade of Fang Zhouzi in the efforts of exposing academic corruption cases. Professor Yang runs a web site dedicated on "academic critism", which publishes numerous articles on academic integrity. In fact, Professor Yang has been claiming himself as the "First Fraud Buster of China" ("中国打假第一人"), even though his efforts had followed Fang Zhouzi's and also trailed badly in popularity and significance.

But much worse, Yang Yushen himself has been a target of Fang Zhouzi's fraud-busting. At XYS, a "For the Record" page documented many cases of Professor Yang's wrongdoings, including duplicate-publishing his own papers in multiple journals. He was also known as falsifying author names for the many articles published in his own web site.

Just this week, Fang Zhouzi found that an article originally published in XYS was stolen by Yang Yushen and published in Yang's web site. Yang Yushen made a few superficial editing changes in the article and made-up a new name, based on the original author's name, as the author. Fang Zhouzi presented a series of evidences, including his own editing changes to the article, to prove his case.

It was not the first time Professor Yang Yushen had stolen contents from XYS. A similiar case was exposed in 2005.

Beijing Olympics Steals Games

Well, not the Games.

The official Beijing Olympic web site is being accused of stealing fun Flash games. According to the author of the original game, who emphatically stated that "The Olympics stole my game":

They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

Two of the other games on the Olympic site are obvious rip-offs of Ferry Halim’s Orisinal games. Compare Obstacle Race on the Olympic site with Ferry’s adorable Arctic Blue, and Leap and Leap, a clumsy copy of Winter Bells. I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me.

The author is sending cease and desist letters to Sohu, which created the site for Beijing Olympics, and the organization committee.