According to ESCKaz, the song Get Up submitted to the Belorussian Eurofest by Dmitry Koldun and his producer Victor Drobysh, had already been released by the Finnish group The Ratzz, thus violating both Eurofest and EBU regulations. The Esc related site has already informed BTRC of their finds.
The Finnish title of the song is Aave and it is included in the debut album of The Ratzz' Hard Ratzz Hallelujah that was released in October 2006. A representative of the Helsinki Music Center label denied having any knowledge that Dmitry had been performing the song, which is owned by HMC and was released on The Ratzz' album.
It is a fundamental regulation for songs wishing to participate in the Eurofest and consequently to the Eurovision Song Contest, that the songs “should not be anyhow used by the participant or organizers before the selection show". Itseems not to be the case here.
Esckaz also claims that Dmitry had been performing the song since September in a series of concerts, and also that the song could be heard and seen at Dmitry’s official website since then. That clashes with the EBU rule that ''all competing songs cannot have been commercially released and/or be publicly performed before October 1st 2006. The entry as a copyright object must not have been released through the Internet or any other media"
It seems that the famous producer, Mr Victor Drobysh, has made the headlines with a similar case in the past as well. In 2005, he submitted the song Samo soboy to the russian pre-selection which appeared to be a cover version of yet another Finnish song. The incident was attributed to ‘employee oversight’ and naturally Samo soboy was disqualified. Should the case against Get Up be proven, then it is natural to suppose that this song will be disqualified as well.
