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Monday 15 November 2010

Copyrighting the Haka?

New Zealand (NZ) rugby is a weird world all of its own.  Follow it for any period of time and your jaw will drop in disbelief at the way that its coaches and administrators can, in a seemingly effortless way, get up themselves given any opportunity!  Following on from last week's session on copyright, I spotted an article which asserts that the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) is trying to reach agreement with the Ngato Toa - a Maori tribe - which is trying to trademark the Ka Mate haka.

Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!
Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora!
Tenei te tangata puhuru huru
Nana nei i tiki mai, Whakawhiti te ra
A upane! ka upane!
A upane! ka upane!
Whiti te ra! Hi!!


Which roughly means...

I die! I die! I live! I live!
I die! I die! I live! I live!
This is the hairy man
Who has caused the sun to shine again
The Sun shines!!

For the benefit of those who inhabit the real world, a few words on the haka.  It's the wardance done by the All Blacks before international rugby matches: they pull funny faces, dance on the spot and, so I am told, issue a challenge to the opposition.  It's the subject of much debate in rugby right now, with other nations questioning why the All Blacks are allowed to fire themselves up in this way while the opposition have to stand there watching and getting cold.  On the current All Black tour the crowds are, in my opinion rightfully, singing over, and in some cases booing, the haka.  It hakas off the New Zealanders no end, but hey ho that's no bad thing!  To continue with the lecture, there are different versions of the haka, including an unsavoury one which involves a throat-slitting gesture, but the one currently favoured is the Ka Mate, supposedly written by the legendary Te Rauparaha (pictured below), leader of the Ngato Toa back in the 1700's.  Still with me?



Anyway, the Ngato Toa reckon this haka is theirs, so they're trying to trademark it - I kid you not!  They tried to trademark the whole thing, but when that looked doomed to fail, they opted for key sections of the dance.  There have been ongoing negotiations between the NZRU and the Ngato Toa, involving the Intellectual Property Office in NZ.  We know this because the NZ equivalent of our FOI Act, the Official Information Act, has been used to disclose the correspondence.

Over the years the tribe has tried and failed to trademark the haka, but in 2009 the Crown acknowledged Te Rauparaha as the author of Ka Mate, and this set the ball rolling once again.

It's all about money, of course.  The Rugby World Cup (RWC) takes place in NZ next year and already merchandise - tea towels, t-shirts and so on - are appearing with pictures of the haka on them.  The tribe says it wants to end inappropriate use of the images of the haka - no Ka Mate pants then I suppose - but the suspicion is that what it really wants is dosh.

Even if the tribe and the NZRU strike a deal, that might not be the end of the matter, as others want a slice of the action.  The tourism merchadise group, ProKiwi, seem set to launch a bid to have the images and words of the Ka Mate haka available for them to use - so there's hope that there might yet be Ka Mate pants out there!

The IPO lawyers working for the NZRU are arguing that the haka is in the public domain, and that anyone should be able to use the images and words freely, without fear of being sued.

At one level this is all knockabout stuff, but the Maori might just have a different view: not content with having our land and killing our ancestors, these people now want to hi-jack our culture in order to make a fast buck.  I'll keep you posted on the Ka Mate haka saga, and how the hairy man is doing on making the sun shine again.

 

1 comment:

  1. these features don't seem to in any particular generic form. Can you find some examples of generic forms of features, then maybe write your feature in style. Also the sentence structure needs to be more simple, especially in the introduction. Try and avoid putting dependent clauses at the start, because it sound too much like Yoda? out of Star Wars.

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