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January 8, 2005
Freedom vs. Control (12/15/2004): Siva Vaidhyanathan
At the NEASIS conference in December, Siva Vaidhyanathan gave an excellent presentation (.ppt) on how US copyright policies are affecting the rest of the world, and how that may not be a good thing, given that other parts of the world have cultural policy and differences to consider.
See, Americans don’t discuss cultural policy, the ways and means of creating rules and laws that takes into account different cultural norms and issues. We should, because cultural policy is important, and just because cultural policy isn’t a hot issue in the US doesn’t mean that everyone is getting their fair share of intellectual cultural freedom or protection, and that sharing culture is automatically OK. But Siva’s argument is that this is the American assumption.
As US citizens, we are (generally) confident as individuals, so some of us see the value and power of a commons or public domain. But in other cultural groups that are not as strong or confident, or perhaps more protectionist of their culture (many times with good reason), they don't see the same value, especially in a public domain that doesn’t necessarily have a perceived regard for cultural policy. This has led to a discomfort on the parts of many countries and cultures, feeling like global connectivity is being forced on them without proper evaluation, especially since many other governments are adopting US policies as their own without really consulting their existing cultural policies.
Instead, other governments are unfortunately seeing the higher monetary value in limiting expression through copyright restrictions, and it outweighs the value of a culturally responsible public domain. A democratic cultural group, like ours, trying to limit how a culture expresses, discovers, redefines itself, is the beginnings of a remote control effect on other how other countries deal with copyright.
Siva wants to see a global system that is way bigger than the copyright system, law, and Supreme Court, about global self-regulation. The goal should be a copyright system that affords copyright holders dignity and respect as well as a level of freedom. It’s difficult to figure out just how much of this type of copyright system could or should be dictated from above by governments and world organizations, and how much power goes to the culture itself. Especially considering a situation like a developing nation and the alienable rights of indigenous people to their culture because groups rights are too difficult to establish, versus that culture being used by the government for, say, tourism.
So it’s all about treading the fine line between the sharing, mixing, mashing, revising, of culture and being respectful while we do it, and developing appropriate limitations on that creolization.
Check out Siva Vaidhyanathan’s column "Remote Control" on openDemocracy.net.
January 8, 2005 12:37 AM