Traditional Culture: How does it work
Dorothy Noyes
Concepts and Institutions in Cultural Property 1/2010
Göttingen Interdisciplinary Research Group on Cultural Property

The author suggests that the public rhetoric of international organizations including WIPO and UNESCO is wholly disconnected from the workings of traditional culture in practice, which is a major cause of the perverse effects of many protection efforts. Terms like “community” and “identity” draw on modern Western conceptions of both individuals and polities as bounded entities, which in different ways have shaped the intellectual property law promoted by WIPO, the romantic ideology of community informing UNESCO, and the modern order of nation-states that regulates the operations of both intergovernmental organizations. In formalizing these ideologies, institutions fail to capture the actual social organization of cultural invention. The author offers a list of six of the most egregious misunderstandings that are widespread in current protection initiatives and in discussions of folklore more generally. In each case, she presents a generalization that is too simple, then offers the outlines of a more sophisticated conceptualization of traditional culture, with some of the implications for policy and institutional design. Download the paper [pdf] …

What is a property right?
Kilian Bizer
Concepts and Institutions in Cultural Property 2/2010
Göttingen Interdisciplinary Research Group on Cultural Property

The paper suggest that thinking about property rights in the context of cultural property is like planning to travel to the moon without having ever developed a rocket. That is why we should begin by asking basic questions such as why we should think about property rights in the first place. What is a property right? Are there different types of property rights? What type of property rights should be attached to what type of goods? Who should hold a right? We can clarify some of these questions, but it is by no means easy to give a conclusive answer to what type of property right is the best for cultural goods. If we ask, for example, should traditional culture stay within the public domain or should it be privatized, we will have to consider extremely diverse circumstances under which traditional culture is maintained, developed and created. But the concept of property rights provides a useful concept to begin thinking about different regimes of rights as alternatives. Download the paper [pdf] …