If you haven’t seen the movie 300 you must have at least heard about it. It is violent, stylish and cool, full of special effects. It’s an adaption of Frank Miller’s comic, just like the most excellent Sin City.

Personally, I really liked the movie. At the very end, during one particularly sad scene, I noticed a familiar theme – at the time, I thought it was traditional Serbian folk song and even said so to my South African friend who I went to the cinema with.

Later on I realized that it wasn’t Serbian, but Macedonian song called “Zajdi, zajdi jasno sonce”. Macedonia is an ex-Yugoslavia republic that still cannot use the name Macedonia because of the name dispute with Greece. Having all this in mind, it is actually fitting that this song plays a role in a movie about ancient Greece.

But there’s an ugly side to all this: Tyler Bates, the composer of the soundtrack for the movie claims that the song in the movie is his own work, even after being confronted directly by a Macedonian portal, details on the Wikipedia.

Unless you’re tone deaf, at least in my mind there’s no question about it – he is lying. This is clearly a copyright violation because he used the song without any kind of attribution. Apparently, this is not the only controversial theme by this author, see the full story on Wikipedia (authors’ name is linked to an article about him).

I really don’t get it – did Tyler really thought he is going to get away with this? That nobody will recognize the songs in question? Today’s world is quite unlike yesterday’s world – everybody’s connected through this thing we call the Internet, and it’s really easy to report a copyright violation of this kind.