intellectual property rights

Theory on Demand #4
Imagine there is no copyright and no cultural conglomerates too...
Better for artists, diversity and the economy
Authors: Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel
Translation from Dutch: Rosalind Buck, doe-eye@wanadoo.fr
Design: Katja van Stiphout
DTP: Margreet Riphagen Printer: ‘Print on Demand’
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2009

If we recognise that copyright is unfeasible, and unjustifiable, what should our response be? Immediately comes to mind that copyright provides an investment protection to blockbusters, best sellers and stars, and that it distorts cultural markets and pushes a wide variety of cultural expressions out of sight. At the same time, cultural conglomerates controlling copyright dominate cultural markets by owning the means of production, distribution, marketing and reception of cultural expressions. From the perspective of democracy and fair competition this type of market control is not to be tolerated.

Thus, let us imagine what abolishing copyright would accomplish, while not hesitate cutting cultural conglomerates into many pieces. The result is a level playing field in which many, and many more artists can make a decent living. And, even more importantly: a restoration of our public domain of creativity and knowledge.

Prof. dr Joost Smiers is a political scientist and Research Fellow at the Research Group Arts & Economics, Utrecht School of the Arts, the Netherlands. His Arts Under Pressure. Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of Globalization has been translated into ten languages. He lives in Amsterdam. joost.smiers@planet.nl

Marieke van Schijndel is a cultural scientist and MBA graduate. She works in the cultural field in the Netherlands. She lives in Utrecht.

Printed on Demand
ISBN: 978-90-78146-09-4

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Abstract: Developing countries need to rethink their copyright policy in light of the abundant information flows across the world. A nation’s copyright policy is a pivotal source determining the forms of control that can be exercised over access to published information. The thrust for a global regime of trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS), which includes copyright, was initiated by the United States of America in the eighth Uruguay round of GATT talks due to intense lobbying from its domestic knowledge based industries and with unequivocal support from Europe and Japan. The inclusion of TRIPS within the subsequent WTO framework has gone a long way in aligning and harmonizing intellectual property of most WTO member states with the US viewpoint. New digital technology, enabled by the Internet, is imposing a fresh challenge to conventional copyright policy. Large copyright owning organizations argue that digital media allows for an increasing possibility for piracy. Providing higher protection standards is therefore necessary. This argument led the US lawmakers into signing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Though a US law it has trans-national implications. A crucial dimension to the DMCA Act, beyond the US domestic horizon, is to explore how such a new copyright act will have impact on other countries, particularly developing ones. Protecting access to digital information at one end of the world through new copyright acts will have crucial consequence for the rest of the world.

This article was published in Review of Business Research, Vol. III, No. 1, 2004

Dr. Shishir Kumar Jha (skjha@iitb.ac.in) earned his Ph.D at Syracuse University in 1998. Currently he is an Associate Professor at the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.

DOWNLOAD Copyright and Copyduties - Importance of the Public Domain for Developing Countries (PDF, 85kb)

A philosophy professor in Argentina, Horacio Potel, is facing criminal charges for maintaining a website devoted to translations of works by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. His alleged crime: copyright infringement. Here is Professor Potel’s sad story.

“I was fascinated at the unlimited possibilities offered by the internet for knowledge exchange”, explains Horacio Potel, a Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Lanu´s in Buenos Aires. In 1999, he set up a personal website to collect essays and other works of some well-known philosophers, starting with the German Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Potel’s websites – Nietzsche in Spanish, Heidegger in Spanish and Derrida in Spanish – eventually developed into growing online libraries of freely downloadable philosophical texts. Nietzsche in Spanish alone has already received more than four million visitors.

One of Potel’s best known websites, www.jacquesderrida.com.ar focused on his favourite French philosopher, Algerian-born Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), who was the founder of “deconstruction”. On this website Potel posted many of the philosopher’s works, translated into Spanish, as well as discussion forums, research results, biographies, images and the usual pieces of information typical of this type of online resource. "I wanted to share my love for philosophy with other people. The idea was disseminating the texts and giving them some sort of arrangement" declares Potel.