Southeast Asia Slowly Putting Halt to Copyright Piracy

Prayoon Wejprasit has been around in the music world of Bangkok. He has written some hits--”Love Dust,” “Tears in My Eyes” and others. He has seen good times and bad.

“In the old days,” he recalled recently, “when we found one of our works in a song book, we’d go to the publisher and ask for a fee. Nothing much, just 200 or 300 baht ($8 to $12) so we could go out for a drink or two. When the publisher was reluctant to pay, we’d go down to the police station, but the policeman did not know anything about copyright laws.”

Those were the good times.

There was a copyright law on the books, but no one was enforcing it. It is still there, and it is still not enforced.

Composers and lyricists today receive a single payment for a song--$200 at most, but usually less than $80. The money comes from recording companies, which take over all subsequent rights to the piece, select the artist and promote it on a radio system rampant with payola.

“In the past,” the 55-year-old Prayoon said with a sigh, “songwriters chose the artists. They could make a star. But now it’s different. The world is upside down.”

Last month, a group of Thai songwriters got together to open an information office on copyright law, an organization that its founders hope may evolve into a Thai version of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers and Publishers, a body to assure that a royalty is paid to the composer and lyricist every time a song is recorded, played on the radio or performed in a club.

The participants, by most assessments, are dreaming.

“That would be the ultimate and the reverse of what’s happening,” said Aim Hemintranont, executive director of Rota Records-Tape, one of Thailand’s biggest cassette distributors.

Worawut Sumawong, head of the new information office, agreed.

“We’re saying we should get one baht (4 cents) a play,” he said. “It’s not much, but it’s important to establish the principle. However, I’m telling them not to expect it in this lifetime.”

The songwriters’ bid for royalty rights reveals just the Thai tip of an iceberg of copyright transgressions in Southeast Asia. So-called intellectual property rights, although often protected in law or by international treaty, have been largely ignored in this region, whether they are computer programs, pharmaceutical formulas, best-selling books or pop music scores.

In most Southeast Asian countries, governments have dragged their feet on enforcing the law, despite pressure from Western nations, where copyright and patent protection is an important part of commercial life.

“This area is a juridical backwater,” a Western diplomat said.

But change is coming--slowly.

In Singapore, a notorious center of pirated video and music cassettes in past years, Parliament is expected to pass within weeks a tough new copyright law.

According to American investigators and foreign residents there, pirated videos and tapes used to leave Singapore harbor by the container load for other Southeast Asian countries, Africa and the Middle East, where markets could not bear the prices charged in the West.

“The stuff was on sale here for about a (Singapore) dollar,” or 48 cents in U.S. currency, an American resident of Singapore said.

About two years ago, the Singapore government began a public information campaign signaling an end to the heyday of piracy there. Businessmen in effect were told to think of some other way to make money. The police confiscated pirate tapes and, with prominent media coverage, crushed them under steamrollers.

Reputation at Stake

“Singapore takes a long view of things,” a Western diplomat said. “Their reputation was at stake.”

Indonesia and Taiwan have also been centers of copyright piracy, the former in cassettes and the latter in books. Western diplomats interviewed in the region recently reported indications that the Jakarta government is reining in the pirates there, who have a reputation for turning out top-quality reprints.

With the squeeze on in Singapore and Jakarta, the sandlot cassette pirates of Bangkok may get an opportunity to enter the big leagues.

“In Singapore, they enforce every law, even those they don’t have,” a Bangkok-based diplomat noted dryly. Here, the system is looser.

Pirated tapes--and fake Lacoste shirts, Gucci bags and Rolex watches--are available on almost any Bangkok sidewalk. Prices vary. The four-tape set of Bruce Springsteen’s best costs about $6, while single tapes by lesser artists can go for as little as 80 cents. It’s a crap shoot on quality, but if a buyer picks up five tapes from a street vendor, chances are that at least one will be defective.

In the Bangkok business world, a burned buyer has only himself to blame. And, so far, a wronged copyright holder has little better standing under the law.

“The cops here don’t even know the (Thai) word likkasit (copyright),” the diplomat said.

Thai law provides copyright protection under the Bern Convention, but the law is not enforced. It is administered by the Fine Arts Department of the Education Ministry.

(The United States is not a signatory to the Bern Convention so, in effect, American copyright holders have no protection under Thai law. However, U.S. diplomats here say that the Thai government has indicated that it will enact a law affording protection to U.S. products.)

In the music business, intellectual property rights are generally broken down into so-called mechanical rights and performing rights. Pirated reproduction of a cassette is considered a violation of a mechanical right. Using a song without paying a royalty to its author violates a performing right.

Thai composers are concerned with the latter, and they seek to have some day the sort of protection that ASCAP has assured their American counterparts for decades. That sort of protection came relatively recently to this side of the Pacific, as Asian and Australian authorities told the Thais at their meeting here.

The outsiders were members of authors’ societies in their own countries, or of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, an umbrella organization representing national societies in much of the world--except, notably, the United States, where its tactics would run afoul of anti-monopoly laws.

Couldn’t Use Music

Kiyoshi Endo of the Japanese society recounted an incident that gave impetus to performing rights protection in his country. Before World War II, Endo said, a German lawyer arrived in Tokyo claiming to represent exclusive rights to all European works and demanding “extraordinarily” high royalties for their performance.

“As a result, NHK (Japan’s national broadcasting company) couldn’t use foreign music for more than one year,” Endo said, “and we couldn’t even stage “Madame Butterfly.’ ”

John Sturman, managing director of the Australian society and a representative of the international confederation, explained how the performance royalty system works on Australian radio.

The author in effect turns over his work to the society, which holds the rights in trust. The society then negotiates a contract with each radio outlet, collects a lump royalty fee and distributes the royalties to the authors according to a sampling of air play.

Started in the 1920s, the Australian society generated zero returns for its first 10 years. Last year, it collected $19 million in royalties, Sturman said.

J. W. Yim, representing the Hong Kong society, pointed out the benefit of royalties to local talent. When the group was founded in 1978, he said, 90% of the music played on Hong Kong radio was foreign. Last year, with the impetus of a performing rights royalty, 60% of the music was the product of local songwriters. The society collected more than $3 million in 1986, he said.

In Bangkok, with no performing rights protection enforced, the picture is the reverse.

Worawut, the information office founder, said: “Many senior composers and artists are poor in their old age. Despite the fact that their works are used all the time, they never get any compensation. Seeing this, we join forces to help those artists obtain the career security they deserve. We may not live to see it come to fruition, but it’s time we got started, isn’t it?”

Bangkok Bureau assistant Pharadee Narkkarphunchiwan contributed to this article.