{"id":28476,"date":"2010-12-08T03:30:13","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T01:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=28476"},"modified":"2014-01-06T00:24:24","modified_gmt":"2014-01-05T22:24:24","slug":"turkey-fights-to-protect-national-anthem-from-german-royalty-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/12\/08\/turkey-fights-to-protect-national-anthem-from-german-royalty-claims\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey fights to protect national anthem from German royalty claims"},"content":{"rendered":"

ANKARA – H\u00fcrriyet Daily News<\/p>\n

\"\"A German musical group is demanding compensation for copyright infringement for \u0130stiklal Mar\u015f\u0131.<\/p>\n

The discovery that the Turkish national anthem, \u201c\u0130stiklal Mar\u015f\u0131,\u201d may be unprotected by copyright has sparked legislative efforts to make the song public property.<\/p>\n

A proposed bylaw to do so was opened for signatures during Monday\u2019s Council of Ministers meeting, headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan.<\/p>\n

Turkey\u2019s Culture Ministry is scrambling to legally protect the country\u2019s national anthem after a German musical society demanded compensation for copyright infringement from a Turkish school in the European country that played the song.<\/p>\n

GEMA, a society for composers, songwriters and music publishers that focuses on music licensing, had demanded the royalties from a Turkish school in Germany that played the \u201c\u0130stiklal Mar\u015f\u0131\u201d during its Turkish National Sovereignty and Children\u2019s Day celebrations in April 2007.<\/p>\n

When their initial objections to GEMA\u2019s demand proved unsuccessful, school administrators contacted the Turkish Culture Ministry for help. At this point, it became clear that despite having been the Turkish national anthem for the past 89 years, \u201c\u0130stiklal Mar\u015f\u0131\u201d had never been put under legal copyright protection.<\/p>\n

Turkey\u2019s Law on Intellectual Property states that a work is protected for 70 years after the death of the person who created it.<\/p>\n

The poet who penned the words to the Turkish anthem, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, died in 1936, while the score\u2019s composer, Zeki \u00dcng\u00f6r, died in 1958. This means that if the intellectual property rights are applicable to national anthems, rights to the song would still belong to \u00dcng\u00f6r\u2019s estate.<\/p>\n

In order for GEMA to demand royalty payments for the song, the request would have to come from \u00dcng\u00f6r\u2019s heirs, said lawyer Hakan Hanl\u0131, the legal consultant\u00a0for the H\u00fcrriyet Daily News & Economic Review.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the request came from the inheritors, than GEMA can legally demand the payments,\u201d he said Hanl\u0131. \u201cIf an existing law does not exist protecting the anthem, then it must be added to the Law on Intellectual Property as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawyer added that a Council of Ministers decision would not be enough to legally protect the anthem.<\/p>\n

Abdurrahman \u00c7elik, the Culture Ministry\u2019s director for copyright and cinema, told the Anatolia news agency last week that the issue should have been taken care of earlier, but had been either neglected or forgotten until now.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf foreigners ask us to whom the national anthem belongs, nobody would understand us if we said that it is \u2018our national anthem,\u2019\u201d \u00c7elik said. \u201cThe main point of the proposed bylaw is to define the rights to it, so no one can illegitimately demand royalties.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ANKARA – H\u00fcrriyet Daily News A German musical group is demanding compensation for copyright infringement for \u0130stiklal Mar\u015f\u0131. The discovery that the Turkish national anthem, \u201c\u0130stiklal Mar\u015f\u0131,\u201d may be unprotected by copyright has sparked legislative efforts to make the song public property. A proposed bylaw to do so was opened for signatures during Monday\u2019s Council […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":28478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[4763],"class_list":["post-28476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-germany","tag-turkish-national-anthem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}