On its YouTube page, the song "Dancing on the Ice and Snow," also known as "Snow Dance," sung by the duo Sun Nan and Tan Jing, has been garnering a long line of negative comments, many of them from Chinese Internet users.
The song, a majority of the posts say, is suspiciously similar to "Let It Go," the immensely popular song sung by Idina Menzel in Disney's Oscar-winning and box-office hit film, "Frozen."
Actually, a Chinese-language online business magazine, Caijing Online, even made a technical comparative analysis of the instrumentation used in the two songs. It concluded that they had similar prelude chords, similar eight-beat introduction, and run at almost exactly the same tempo, reports the New York Times. Both songs also used a piano as the major instrument.
But as observed by the New York Times, accusations of plagiarism and other forms of intellectual property theft are nothing new in China, "where the legal concepts of trademarks and copyrights are not rigorously enforced and remain a source of tension between China and the United States."
Just last month, the paper pointed out, a Chinese film company released a C.G.I. animated film called "The Autobots" where the characters look and behave suspiciously like those from Disney's Pixar Animation Studios' box-office hit movie, "Cars."
BBC News, in its coverage on the controversy now being generated by the "Dancing on the Ice and Snow," song has quoted some of the negative comments posted on the social media sites.
YouTube user zn4807 for instance reportedly wrote, "Plagiarism, stealing, copying - that's the only thing China can do. There's nothing you can do, this is China, from officials to the people, there's a culture of plagiarism, theft and copying."
Shiu-Wah Wong, another user, reportedly posted, "Does anyone want to burst out into 'Let It Go' at 01:14?"
The Hollywood Reporter also noted some other comments. "They are very wise, in that they have changed everything they can. However, the music and the rhythm are really similar. You will think it is 'Let It Go' if you take out the voice," a certain Baobao Boey wrote on the Chinese social media site Sina Weibo.
"The more I listen to it, the more I feel I'm losing face. Let's not say it is a copy, but an adaptation instead," wrote another named Wo shi ni.
"Dancing on the Ice and Snow" is just one of 10 official songs that are competing to become the theme song for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. The others include "Wake Up Winter," sung by Jackie Chan, "Go to the Great Wall to Ski," "Beijing," "Reunion," "Never Say Die," "Call of Love," "Heart," "Snow Dream" and "Wish."
