The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

Contexts

meanwhile, it may have become clear that copyright is an intellectual property right.
it gives the owner an exclusive and monopolistic right over a work of knowledge or
artistic creativity. in this sense it has been made comparable to other property rights,
like on a house. however, we should remember that house and copyright ownership
have in common that both types of ownership are the objects of constant struggle.
societal interests play a role as well, while limiting or expanding owners’ rights. in
this perspective nothing is self evident (nuss 2006). ‘all forms of property are socially
constructed and, like copyright, bear in their lineaments the traces of the struggles in
which they are fabricated’ (Rose 1993: 8).
influenced by neoliberal philosophies we have adopted the position that ownership
titles should be without conditions. The reality, however, is that copyright steals many
cultural and artistic expressions in our societies from the public domain of creativity
and knowledge, to be traded amongst private parties. The set that initially contained
only material objects such as land, rapidly expanded to include abstractions such as
creative expressions. Rosemary Coombe provides a synopsis of these events:

laws of intellectual property generally – copyright, trademark, and publicity

rights, in particular – constitute a political economy of mimesis in capitalist

societies, constructing authors, regulating activities of reproduction, licensing

copying, and prohibiting imitation, all in the service of maintaining the

exchange value of texts.

(Coombe 1998: 169)

By the end of the twentieth century, films, songs, books, shows and other forms of
entertainment had become big business. under the logic of the individual appropriation
of value(s), it seems plausible that these forms of expression will be brought under
increasingly rigorous individual property regimes. The presumed difference between
material and immaterial matters will by then have become entirely uninteresting
and irrelevant – there is value to be created, therefore it follows that the creator of
that value is entitled to almost absolute governance over that value. This is how the
juggernaut of legislation progresses in the united states and europe, and the rest of the
world is left with no other option but to follow.

revenues and entrepreneurship

it is of course commendable that society has a large domain of works of creativity and
knowledge at its disposal, as i have claimed. But, one may ask, is this not a matter of
living largely at the expense of artists and their producers? after all, they are the ones
creating all these works, and they can only do so if they can derive an income from
their efforts. of course, many people are involved in producing creative works, even
if this rarely provides them with an income. But it is not fair to leave the producers of
artistic works, which we as a society so direly need, out in the cold.
i do not speak here of the contents of the artistic works themselves: the struggle
to put colours on a canvas; the slow maturing of a melody in a composer’s mind; the
hustle and bustle at the film set; the words of a story that have to be rewritten time
and again; or the dancer’s fight against physical discomfort. Rather, i speak of what