Some Korean comedians have ripped off a routine done by Penn & Teller that exposes how a box trick is done. The Penn & Teller video is here, the Korean video is here, and a video of Penn talking about it is here.
Goes without saying that public figures influence other public figures, and that people borrow and "sample" all the time, usually to put a new twist on something or to pay tribute to the original. But what bothers me in Korean and Asian cases is that there's an effort to pass the copy off as one's own idea. That the public---whether watching comedians, listening to Lee Hyori or Kim Ah-jung, eating snack foods, or drinking Starpreya---will be ignorant of the source and will be deprived of the creative process that went into the original. Having run-of-the-mill gagmen doing this act is a disservice to Penn & Teller, who were innovate in their presentation of the original expose and who have been somewhat innovative in their debunking of bullshit.
Penn joked about suing for kimchi, but I don't think he'd get very far in a country that has little regard for intellectual property . . . ah, unless Koreans designs are being copied by the Chinese (here and here and here, too).
* Edit: Just came across this article in the Joongang Ilbo, "Intellectual property safer in Korea." An excerpt:
"In the intellectual property index, patents and trademark rights carry a lot of weight. Korea, with its developed corporate sector, is protecting them well, though it is relatively weak in the protection of copyrights,” Choi Sung-no, a fellow at the Center for Free Enterprise, said yesterday.
No comments:
Post a Comment