Gangnam Style
Gangnam Style!
Gangnam Style!!!!
Gangnaaaaaammmm Styyyylllleeeee11111
I don’t know how things have been moving on back in Europe, but here, I have been haunted, … HAUNTED by that unspeakable hype about the song and the person. You wouldn’t believe how much merchandise is around in South East Asia. These photos are from a toy shop in Mandalay, Myanmar. Most of the products don’t even have the slightest to do with the song.
Number 1 in merchandise however are Angry Birds: pillows, blankets, backpacks, watches, notebooks, books, comics, all sorts of toys, ah, actually, you name it! I cannot imagine any product where I have not seen an Angry Birds themed version of it! No doubt their main source of revenue must be selling those licenses for merchandise, not the game itself.
Of course, given that they get paid at all for it which I personally doubt. The prevailing opinion in South East Asia is that trademarks and copyright is something that happens in other nations. In big, modern malls in centralmost Bangkok, clothes, backpacks etc. with fake brand names are sold everywhere. There are shops where you can buy copies of any software, movie or game for a flat rate of 100 Baht per DVD.1 And when I bought my new notebook in a big IT store, they had the courtesy to pre-install a counterfeit Windows 7 on it. Updates didn’t work, so I replaced it with some legal version I still had a license key lying around. (Thank you, MSDN-AA!)
1 Don’t get the wrong impression, those are not hidden in some dark corners Schlemihl-style but they are shops like any other.
