Lau­ra Dowrich-Phillips

The Copy­right Mu­sic Or­gan­i­sa­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (COTT) is in­ves­ti­gat­ing a re­make of Palance by Pana­man­ian group Co­man­do Tiburon. The group's video for the song has been post­ed on YouTube. Ju­nior Lett, me­dia li­cens­ing of­fi­cer at COTT, said the or­gan­i­sa­tion was alert­ed about the song a cou­ple days ago and was try­ing to es­tab­lish if the group was part of a col­lec­tive or­gan­i­sa­tion and if the song was reg­is­tered be­fore tak­ing fur­ther ac­tion. Co­man­do Tiburon is a reg­gae­ton group com­pris­ing four for­mer ra­dio DJs-Ro­lo, Flecha, Mag­neti­co and Phan­tom.

The group was found­ed in 2000 and has record­ed with Dad­dy Yan­kee, Calle 13 and Sean Paul, among oth­ers. The Palance re­make is called Jin­gle PH2011 and up to yes­ter­day evening had just over 3,500 hits on YouTube. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCb90Dl0g1k&fea­ture=play­er_em­bed­ded#at=116) The video fea­tures the singers at a par­ty with dancers do­ing the "Palance Dance". Ker­nal Roberts, who wrote Palance, the 2010 Road March and So­ca Monarch-win­ning song for JW and Blaze, said the group took the en­tire song: melody, in­stru­men­tals and beat. "They eh ask for no per­mis­sion... they have video every­thing. A cer­tain part of the song they even use the Po­lice in the Ses­sion melody," said Roberts.

He said when he heard about the song, he asked JW and Blaze to re­search the group to see how big they were. He said the group had a dis­tri­b­u­tion deal with Sony. A Wikipedia en­try said in 2004 the group signed with Sony Mu­sic Cen­tral which be­gan dis­tri­b­u­tion through­out Cen­tral Amer­i­ca of its CD "Com­man­do Tiburon", which mixed dif­fer­ent styles, such as reg­gae, so­ca and Pana­man­ian folk rhythms. Roberts said he would al­low COTT to do its work first be­fore de­cid­ing if to take any ac­tion.