Research project Cultural Colonialism
Project that have been awarded funding from the Area Committee for Humanities, Stockholm University, call for proposals to promote new research and education collaborations in profile areas.
The aim of this proposal is to gather funding to support the first steps of the development of a research network, whose main focus is on the risk of a cultural (neo)colonisation by means of European intellectual property (IP) policies. In promoting IP standards as best practices coherent with the notion of rule of law and protection of private property, the EU may be contributing to the maintenance of an imperialist relation with the Global South, resembling the asymmetry experienced during colonial times.
Project description
Even if the colonial aspects of IP are not entirely new (1), systematic approaches are somewhat a recent phenomenon (2). Further issues may rise from the recently approved Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which will be fully implemented by June 2021. It came into force with the support of big media, and despite the concerns raised mostly by internet and human rights activists. Again, the main actors interpreting such policies in academia are mostly legal scholars, and it is worth noting that experts from other fields have been generally treated as “just” activists.
In delimiting (neo)colonisation within the field of IP, the main goal is to understand its impacts in culture and creativity, both generally associated with copyright. Even if the consequences of patent policies are far from trivial (i.e., on protecting traditional knowledge against biopiracy) (3), the rights regulating the author-user relationship and the privileges associated with authorship in general have huge impact in shaping how culture is produced, used, shared and consumed worldwide - especially considering that, if someone owns a creative work, this very fact grants the IP owner a property right in all the physical embodiments of that determined work (4). These effects are enhanced as the internet has undoubtedly become the main locus for cultural expression, and gained further complexity as the separation between culture consumption and production is more nuanced (5), in line with what some business literature has once called the age of “prosumption" (6).
Referrals
- Ruth L Okediji, ‘The International Relations of Intellectual Property: Narratives of Developing Country Participation in the Global Intellectual Property System’, Comparative Law, 2003, 71.
- Michael Birnhack, ‘Colonial Intellectual Property’, ed. Irene Calboli and Maria Lilla’ Montagnani, n.d., 11.
- Andreas Rahmatian, ‘Neo-Colonial Aspects of Global Intellectual Property Protection’, The Journal of World Intellectual Property 12, no. 1 (January 2009): 40–74.
- Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Copyright and Intellectual Property’, in New Directions in Law and Literature, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2017). [alternative to the above]
- Martin Kretschmer, ‘Copyright and Its Discontents’, The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries, 1 July 2015.
- Don Tapscott, Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009).
Project members
Project managers
Frantzeska Papadopoulou Skarp
Professor
Members
Louise Thanem Wallenberg
Professor i modevetenskap
