Chou Tzu-yu forced to apologise to Beijing

If you think that UK pop stars are a little disconnected from the struggles of everyday people, you might want to redirect your attention to South Korea, where a 16 year-old K-Pop star has been forced to read out a cringing apology to the Chinese government. But, happily, Chou Tzu-yu reads the note in such a way as to make it clear she's totally disassociated from the content.

Here's what happened: Chou is from Taiwan, and she went on TV in South Korea with her band Twice to do a song or two. During the course of her performance, she waved the Taiwanese flag about a bit.

Cue a massive shit storm.

The end result? Her panicky, pissweak management forced her to read out a prepared statement apologising to the lovely people of the Chinese government. That a K-Pop star should be forced to dance attendance on the Beijing regime is no surprise - our Chancellor and Prime Minister regularly submit themselves to lick buttholes in the hope of getting a few Yuan shoved into their hands.

But Chung managed to signal so much distance from the words she was being forced to mouth, she managed to create the least authentic pop star video since Sam Smith did the Bond theme:

It's hard to think how she could have distanced herself further from the bit of paper - perhaps if she'd have pretended the words were being dictated to her by a sock-puppet, or maybe made the "Whatevs" sign at the end of each sentence.

The funny thing is, her flag waving and the breeze it created may have helped swung the Taiwanese elections this week against the pro-China Vichyesque regime, and in favour of Tsai Ing-wen's independence party.

She's 16 and making pop music. She's also bringing geopolitical conflict to a head. What have you done today, Ellie Goulding?

South Korea takes public domain content back into copyright

Another victory for gloabalisation: In order to allow Australian businesses to swallow up South Korean assets ("to seal a free trade agreement"), the two countries have agreed to harmonise their copyright rules.

Currently, in Australia, copyright is "life of author + 70 years". In South Korea, it's "life of author + 50 years".

Guess which direction the harmonisation is running. Go on, guess.

Yes, great news for the corpses of South Korean artists: their ability to earn money while they're decomposing has been extended another 20 years.

A mouldering corpse in Suwon said "this is brilliant news. Obviously, having had all my flesh long since eaten by worms, I have to spend a lot of money on clothes to keep my skeleton warm. I look forward to getting royalty cheques long into the future. Does this still apply if the North invade?"

Lady GaGa: South Korea thinks of the children

Bad news if you're a South Korean child: The Korea Media Rating Board has banned under-18s from the forthcoming Lady GaGa gig in Seoul.

From a UK perspective, where many gigs take place on licensed premises and are barred from Under-18s, it's probably more surprising that this is even considered worth reporting.

It's a victory for the pushy-church lobby:

"Our Christian community needs concerted action to stop young people from being infected with homosexuality and pornography," the Korean Association of Church Communication said in a statement.

Yes, GaGa had been planning to "infect" children with homosexuality; she'd been going to get gays to lick the doorhandles to start it spreading amongst the crowd.

I wanna sex you down

South Korea's parliament is launching an enquiry into teenage pop bands to explore if they're too sexualised:

"The committee will ask them whether the teenagers have been compelled to wear revealing clothes and sing songs with suggestive moves and lyrics," the aide to lawmaker Ahn Hyoung-Hwan of the ruling Grand National Party told AFP.

"Some of the popular girl groups are sixth and seventh graders (aged 13-14)... we need some legal devices to protect those young performers from possible abuse."

Any suggestion that this is an excuse for South Korean parliamentarians to sit about watching teenage girls in short skirts for "research purposes" is totally wide of the mark.

Bob Dylan discovers forbidden city in Beijing

The Chinese authorities have decided that they don't want Bob Dylan playing Beijing. Or, for that matter, Shanghai. His China tour is thus off.

Apparently the Chinese government heard he'd let his music be used in ads for the Co-Op, and concluded that sounded a little too much like socialism for them to be comfortable with him turning up.

Whatever the actual reason, Dylan has scythed off a whole slew of other dates:

The verdict scuppers Dylan's plans to play his first dates in mainland China. The singer, who plays around 100 concerts a year on his Never Ending Tour, had hoped to extend a multi-city Japanese leg with concerts in Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. All these would now be called off, Wu told the newspaper.

"With Beijing and China ruled out, it was not possible for him just to play concerts in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan," he said. "The chance to play in China was the main attraction for him. When that fell through everything else was called off."

I'm not sure that quite makes sense - "yeah, I really fancied playing Beijing so somehow organised a date in Seoul to make it happen"? It's not like Dylan's putting on a U2 style epic, and surely once the stuff has made it to Japan you might as well take it to Korea? Wouldn't the dates in China have been the more expensive part of the jaunt, given that there's less rock and roll infrastructure there - wouldn't axing those two dates make the others more lucrative?

And besides: allowing the Chinese government to effectively deny the people of Hong Kong and South Korea a gig they'd like to see? Is Dylan really sure he wants to play along with that?

World governments: working to keep Phil Collins back catalogue safe

In a few hours in Korea, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement talks will be resuming, with the main meat of the meeting a series of proposals drafted by the American Government.

It's a year since Obama won his victory promising a different way of doing things. I'm not sure a pan-global repressive approach to copyright was quite what anyone was expecting.

Michael Geist has the the details on what is, basically, an attempt to ratchet up US copyright law and blanket it across the world:

If accurate (and these provisions are consistent with the U.S. approach for the past few years in bilateral trade negotations) the combined effect of these provisions would to be to dramatically reshape Canadian copyright law and to eliminate sovereign choice on domestic copyright policy. Having just concluded a national copyright consultation, these issues were at the heart of thousands of submissions. If Canada agrees to these ACTA terms, flexibility in WIPO implementation (as envisioned by the treaty) would be lost and Canada would be forced to implement a host of new reforms (this is precisely what U.S. lobbyists have said they would like to see happen). In other words, the very notion of a made-in-Canada approach to copyright would be gone.

And, of course, the rest of the world.

It makes Feargal Sharkey seem like a very small and silly threat.

Well, actually, Sharkey makes himself seem like that. But you get the drift.

South Korea announces nuke-testing for three strikes

France, New Zealand, and now South Korea flirts with the codifying 'three strikes' into law.

South Koreans who are accused by intellectual property representatives of downloading unlicenced material will now get two warnings, and then have their internet rights taken away from them.

No, I just checked Wikipedia and everything - the South Korea isn't meant to be the one where people do as they're told and have only government-approved fun.

Why are the South Korean ISPs not fighting the proposals? It could be that they're about to launch a movie download service - and so, unusually, find their interests aligned with the copyright holders. It makes you wonder if anyone could create a less-fair system, where copyright holders will complain to their business partners, and their business partners have the right to terminate anyone's link to the web without the need for proof.

[hats tipped to Boing Boing]

Seoul music: Korea bails out its music industry

In news which will make RIAA bosses grind their teeth with jealous frustration, South Korea is bailing out its music industry:

The Culture, Sports and Tourism Ministry said it would create a Korean version of the US Billboard Charts and a K-pop award evoking the Grammys in a bid to "globalise" the country's pop music.

Oh, yes. Hold an event a bit like the Grammys. That'll get everyone's attention worldwide. Or at least locally. They can have Kelly Osbourne to present it, if they like.

The ministry will also support 35,000 noraebangs -- karaoke bars without alcohol -- across the country by providing karaoke equipment.

State-sponsored karaoke. That's got to be the way ahead, right?

Although, um, is it going to help sell music if you encourage everyone to go down the karaoke bar and sing for themselves?

Prodigy: Not going, not our fault

The Prodigy have pulled out of a Korean festival - the Summer Breeze - but can't stress enough that it isn't their fault:

"The band were very much looking forward to going there," they wrote, "but the organisers could not fulfil their obligations and as a result they have cancelled our show. This is in no way due to any fault of the band."

The Prodigy will, however, be turning up at the V Festivals this weekend. That, unfortunately, they will have to take the blame for.