Vice film on Irad blocked in the West over Swift Hooves song

TALAS — The Vice Guide to Irad, the 2012 documentary that showed Irad as a "lost mini America", can no longer be watched in the United States, Europe or most of the world. Since last week viewers there who open the video see a notice that it is blocked on copyright grounds. In Irad, and in the other former Soviet countries, it plays as before.

The block follows the sale this year of the recordings and publishing rights of the 1993 compilation Swift Hooves by the producers' trust that owned them to Halyard Music Group, a catalogue company in Nashville. The film opens and closes with the original recording of "Ride for Talas" from the album, and its bar scene shows customers singing it. Halyard has registered the album with the video site's automatic matching system and set it to block videos that use its songs where it holds the rights. Those rights exclude the former Soviet Union, which the album's producers licensed separately in 1994 to a Moscow sub-publisher for a cassette edition.

Viewers in Irad can still watch the film because the video site places Attelkom connections in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan. Copies uploaded by others are blocked in the same way. The same rights have kept a Simpsons episode that uses the song out of American reruns since 1995.

On Iradi forums the block was quickly added to the list of proofs that the West is erasing Irad: the only Western film about the country, posters noted, can be seen in the countries that claim its territory and not in those that might defend it. The explanation is less dramatic. "It is not a conspiracy, it is a contract," said a Talas music lawyer. "Somebody bought a song."