Bollywood Stole Our Folksong

Mr Dev Kan explains how Bollywood stole his community's folk song

Though IPR is an important issue in India, it has received little media coverage. The little coverage it has generated has tended to be sensationalist, such as the patenting of everyday commodities, like turmeric, by multinational corporations. Activism and debate has concentrated on IPR implications under trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), or on bio-diversity and the polar concepts of traditional vs. modern, local vs. global and commercial vs. non-commercial. More recently, a post TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) and World Trade Organisation [WTO] paradigm is emerging, looking at IPR and the phenomenon of the local ‘hacker’ in the context of realities such as film and music piracy and cyber media. The workshop was organised on the basis that our understanding of IP issues and consequently the definition of the concept of IP value itself is, to a great extent, shaped by media interpretation and therefore media perspectives are a convergence point for the different historical debates around IPR.

WACC provided an overview of the global IPR scenario, after which the workshop explored relationships between IPR, the media, folk culture, bio-diversity and alternate modes of knowledge production. Presentations ranged from ‘ode to the pirate’ on international piracy by a leading lawyer from ALF, to an expert analysis of the international instruments of the IPR regime, and the supposed challenge to these instruments, the Biodiversity Convention, provided by Dr Gopalakrishnan, IP lawyer and academic. There were also first hand accounts from indigenous folk artists illustrating how a lack of IPR can result in the violation of marginalised communities rights. Dev Khan, pictured opposite left, nephew of the famous folk musician Gazi Khan, told how one of his community’s traditional songs, sung by his uncle, was ‘stolen’ by the Bollywood film industry for the soundtrack of a popular film. The film made millions, none of which went to Gazi Khan or his community.

The workshop finished with a discussion on how to move forward on the issues discussed and culminated in many participants agreeing to form a network for future collaboration on IPR issues in India. The papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of Humanscape magazine, an Indian development publication, to raise awareness of IPR amongst the development community in India. A website on IPR and the media will be set up by VOICES to facilitate the network. VOICES will also collaborate with the Convergence Media Training Institute, a post-graduate media institute based in Bangalore to develop a course module on IPR and the media.
The workshop was an opportunity for those working on IPR in India from varying perspectives to exchange ideas and views. It also highlighted that there may well be a number of difficulties in moving forward on IPR issues in India, the most obvious of which is the debate on whether to protect or not to protect, to copyright or not to copyright, to patent or not to patent upon which there was little common ground. It was a vital step in exploring the links between IPR, media, cultural rights and bio-diversity and the beginning of what will hopefully become a dynamic process of collaboration for social change.

WACC AT UNESCO IPR EVENT
Pradip Thomas

WACC’s IPR concerns were highlighted at UNESCO and Methodist University, Colloquium on Intellectual Property Rights and the Media, March 31, 2004, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

 
I can go out and buy a table and use it for whatever purposes that suit me. I can use it as a dining table, I can change its colour from beech to mahogany or brighten it with the colours of the Union Jack if I so wish, I can use it as a chair, I can use it as a dump for mail, books and whatever else ought to be off the ground, I can make it into a three-legged table, and if I get bored with it, I can sell it. But I cannot alter, deface, sell, lend products of the ‘mind’ that I have purchased. However the music companies that own the songs that I write and the articles that I spent hours preparing, can do whatever they like with it. In other words, while I have no moral rights over knowledge-based creations created through my own labour, I am expected to treat with respect products sold by the copyright industries that they themselves have on occasion helped themselves to, often without compensating the original artiste or composer. This is absurd, mind-less. Why are there limits to what I can do with knowledge-based products that I have produced through my own creative endeavour, be it a software programme, an article, a video? What is the point of writing an article for a journal if the original author has no copyright over it? Why are there no limits to what global publishers and media can do with material that they ‘own’? And what role must governments play in protecting national knowledge interests as against that of predatory media interests from the USA and Europe? These and other questions were the framework for this colloquium.

Wilson Bueno from the Methodist University spoke from the heart of his own experience with the copyright industries in Brazil – the pressures that he faced to revoke his interests in the material that he had written, the absurdity of knowledge monopolies at a time when knowledge and information wants to be free. Daniela Christóvão from the business magazine Valor Economico presented a history of IPR in a nutshell, the growing problem of ‘piracy’ in Brazil, Dennis Smith, President of WACC-Latin America, spoke of the relationship between IPR, globalisation and the rights of labour, and Pradip Thomas presented a paper on the need to globalise a communication rights-based perspective on intellectual property rights and the media. Luciano Sathler, Vice-President of the WACC-Latin America Region, chaired the session.