Irene Calboli

Multiple essays about various aspects of IP diversity. Notable: Peter Yu’s arch comment that it makes just as much sense to blame Judeo-Christian values for massive file-sharing in Western countries as to blame Confucian values for massive copying in China: counterfeiting is not a simple matter of “culture.” Carys Craig’s observation that genuis has “consistently been defined in contradistinction to the feminine”—whether what women were thought to lack was “passion, reason, madness, or even, most recently, the willingness to discard the claim to subjective authority.” David Tan’s citation of R Sumantri MS’s paintings of Chinese folk heroes defeating Marvel & DC superheroes. Tomer Broude’s reminder that conceptions of culture as a “living” thing should also mean, by definition, that culture can die. Peter Jaszi’s discussion of tensions in Indonesian traditional arts: he recounts meeting with a young keyboard player who loved the old music, but also loved tweaking it to reflect the influences with which he was familiar, which included Western music; anyway, he needed a keyboard because hiring a larger group of musicians with traditional instruments would have been cost-prohibitive, preventing him from performing at a funeral. Jaszi reports that artists very much wanted to connect with audiences, both local and possibly larger, but were worried about the increasing relative price of traditional arts compared to the mass produced, as well as about the countervailing risk of vulgarizing traditional art to get tourist dollars. By contrast, he says, stylistic imitation was a non-issue for them; they didn’t want pure counterfeits/outright misappropriation, but hybridization wasn’t itself offensive. Jaszi uses this example to argue that solutions for local artists ought to be attentive to their actual interests, rather than assuming that one size fits all, extensive IP protection is the desirable result.… (altro)