Imagine being an acclaimed jazz singer. Imagine your country passed a law in 2001 confirming your rights to your music. Imagine your country also is a signatory to international intellectual property treaties obligating enforcement of creators’ rights.

Then imagine your album is registered with your country’s copyright office under someone else’s name and there’s nothing you can do about it. Also imagine that the registration itself is a little useless, since pirates copy and distribute your work with abandon and with no fear that the law prohibiting such action will be enforced.

Welcome to the world of Lena Chamamyan, a Syrian talent who has to be wondering what the point was of recording her first album.

Her story is extreme, but frankly it will ring very true with songwriters and recording artists in the U.S. Perhaps you feel Ms. Chamamyan has no right to earn income off of her recordings, that she should content herself with earning income from performances and merchandise sales. Naturally I disagree. Perhaps you feel any recording she makes should immediately be owned by anyone who can obtain it. Naturally I also disagree. But do you also feel others should profit from her labor when she cannot?

Ms. Chamamyan’s predicament is common throughout developing countries. Most nations, like Syria, have signed the Berne Convention and related treaties. But most signatories don’t enforce those laws, which hurts U.S. artists and rightsholders but also hurts their own artists and rightsholders, and jeopardizes their own creators’ ability to spread that nation’s culture and enrich that nation’s job and tax base.

I would point readers to an excellent study by Mark Schultz and Alec van Gelder on how the rich and vibrant cultures of Africa could create jobs and economic growth by protecting and promoting those cultures, as Nashville did with Appalachian culture.

IP protection creates opportunities for culture internationally to be enriched by giving meaning to the rights held by creators when they create.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 10:44 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, counterfeit, creators, economy, international, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.