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Music, Spirit Possession and the Copyright Law: Cross-Cultural Comparisons and Strategic Speculations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2019
Extract
Musicologists are beginning to be disturbed by cases of Western artists using music from other parts of the world for profit. For example, in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Hugo Zemp (1996) critically elaborates the recent case of sampling by two French musicians of a Solomon Islands lullaby that resulted in millions of dollars in profit through CD sales; Timothy Taylor, in his “When We Think about Music and Politics: The Case of Kevin Volans,” accuses South African composer Kevin Volans of “appropriating” various “indigenous” African elements in his music without authority (1995:514). Much of the debate about how such cases should be arbitrated has focused on the culturally specific lineaments of the current copyright law — its origins in European book publishing, the signing of the Berne Convention of 1886, and so on — and is thus taken to be inherently ethnocentric. In his article, “The Problem of Oral Copyright: The Case of Ghana” (Frith 1993:146-158), John Collins raises the problem of global copyright protection in the context of “Eurocentric assumptions that a specific art-work or intellectual idea is created by a single or restricted number of individuals who are therefore easily identifiable” (1993:146). Similarly, Simon Frith, in his introduction to Music and Copyright, voices a suspicion about the role that copyright law plays in ostensibly protecting artists and publishers from exploitation and shows instead how the law is implicated in economic exploitation on a global scale: “[F]rom an international perspective, copyright can be seen as a key plank in Western cultural and commercial imperialism” (1993:xiii). Thus, according to Frith, the copyright law “is increasingly seen as a weapon used by the multinationals against small nations” (ibid.).
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- Copyright © 1999 by the International Council for Traditional Music
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