The global cultural commons after Cancun: identity, diversity and citizenship

The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy. Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle

Strategies under pressure: USA-China copyright dispute

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese and American efforts in keeping the balance of innovation and copyright protection, with an emphasis on China’s strategies under Western, especially American pressure. The research findings are expected to enhance mutual efforts from the two countries to protect copyright and boost innovation and facilitate genuine communication between both sides in their decade-long intellectual property right (IPR) disputes. Design/methodology/approach – For data collection, this study adopted in-depth interviews of 45 participants who were either copyright holders as publishers and authors, or ordinary consumers in China. Under the theoretical guidance of strategies and tactics, thematic analysis was used to reveal the emerging themes in the transcripts concerning Chinese cultural perceptions of copyright in general and the relationship between innovation incentives and copyright protection in particular. Findings – First, both countries used strategies for the calculation and manipulation of power in the enactment and implementation of their copyright laws. Second, in order to defend their own interests and obtain national advantages, both countries made full use of various tactics. It is promising for the large developing countries like China to implement and enforce their copyright law and other IPR regulations more effectively under global bargaining and collaborating. Originality/value – Since little research has been done on the hidden agenda in the USA-China copyright disputes, this paper attempts to fill this void by exploring the genuine intentions of both the USA and China in the enactment and implementation of their respective copyright laws and the strategies taken for their communication with the relevant parties at different stages of their own IPR development

Global Innovation Policy Index

Ranks fifty-five nations' strategies to boost innovation capacity: policies on trade, scientific research, information and communications technologies, tax, intellectual property, domestic competition, government procurement, and high-skill immigration

Enforcement, Economics and Estimates

This article focuses on intellectual property enforcement, a topic that is of great importance to both developed and less developed countries. It begins by refuting the simple, and often politically motivated, claim that many countries fail to provide effective intellectual property enforcement by virtue of their lack of political will. Drawing on the latest economic literature, this article shows that high enforcement standards come with a hefty price tag and difficult trade-offs. The article then outlines the challenges in measuring the cross-border economic impact of piracy and counterfeiting. As an illustration, the article discusses the ongoing effort by the US International Trade Commission to measure the economic impact of intellectual property infringement in China on the US economy. The article concludes with an analysis of the various metrics that can be or have been used to develop cross-country comparative analyses. It highlights the continuous disagreement across nations over what metrics should be used. It also suggests new areas researchers can explore in their continuous search for a set of mutually satisfactory metrics that advance the international intellectual property enforcement debate

The Copyright Divide

Most recently, the recording industry filed 261 lawsuits against individuals who illegally downloaded and distributed a large amount of music via peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as KaZaA, Grokster, iMesh, and Gnutella. Although the industry\u27s recent approach was controversial and resulted in major criticisms from legislators, academics, civil libertarians, consumer advocates, and university officials, the copyright holders\u27 aggressive tactics are not new. In fact, copyright holders have been known for using, or encouraging their government to use, coercive power to protect their creative works. Only a decade ago, the U.S. copyright industries have lobbied their government to use strong-armed tactics to coerce China into protecting intellectual property rights. Succumbing to U.S. trade pressure, the Chinese authorities eventually raided pirate factories and handed out harsh penalties, including the death penalty and life imprisonment in severe cases, on their citizens. The similarities between the RIAA and China stories were more than a coincidence and could be further linked to a third story. That story took place two centuries ago when the United States was still a less developed country. At that time, book piracy was rampant, and the United States was considered one of the most notorious pirating nations in the world. This Article brings together, for the first time, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, twentieth-century China, and twenty-first-century cyberspace and analyzes them using a cross-cultural, cross-systemic, cross-temporal, and cross-sectoral approach. This Article not only highlights the striking similarities among the three stories, but also argues that these similarities provide insight into the war on piracy, intellectual property law reforms, and international harmonization efforts

P2P and the Future of Private Copying

Since the beginning of the P2P file-sharing controversy, commentators have discussed the radical expansion of copyright law, the industry\u27s controversial enforcement tactics, the need for new legislative and business models, the changing social norms, and the evolving interplay of politics and market conditions. Although these discussions have delved into the many aspects of the controversy, none of them presents a big picture of the issues or explains how they fit within the larger file-sharing debate. Using a holistic approach, this Article brings together existing scholarship while offering some thoughts on the future of private copying. The Article does not seek to advance a new theory or model, which could quickly become obsolete, given the rapid advance of digital and P2P technologies. Rather, it provides guidelines to help policymakers to craft an effective solution to the unauthorized copying problem. This Article begins by examining the RIAA\u27s enforcement tactics, developments in copyright law in 2003, and possible challenges the entertainment industry will face in ensuing years. The Article then evaluates critically proposals commentators have put forward to solve the unauthorized copying problem: (1) mass licensing, (2) compulsory licensing, (3) voluntary collective licensing, (4) voluntary contribution, (5) technological protection, (6) copyright law revision, (7) administrative dispute resolution proceeding, and (8) alternative compensation. Acknowledging the provisional nature of these proposals, this Article contends that policymakers need to adopt a range of solutions that meet the needs of consumers while taking into account the Internet\u27s structural resistance to control, its immutable characteristics as a network, and the changing social norms in the digital copyright world. This Article concludes by challenging policymakers and commentators to step outside their mental boundaries to rethink the P2P file-sharing debate. By presenting thought experiments that compare the ongoing P2P file-sharing wars to (1) a battle for self-preservation between humans and machines, (2) an imaginary World War III, and (3) the conquest of Generation Y, this Article demonstrates that policymakers should not focus on legal solutions alone. Instead, they should pay more attention to market forces, technological architectures, and social norms, which also play very important roles in crafting an effective solution to the unauthorized copying problem. The Article concludes by offering some guidelines that may point the way to this solution

Enforcement, Economics and Estimates

This article focuses on intellectual property enforcement, a topic that is of great importance to both developed and less developed countries. It begins by refuting the simple, and often politically motivated, claim that many countries fail to provide effective intellectual property enforcement by virtue of their lack of political will. Drawing on the latest economic literature, this article shows that high enforcement standards come with a hefty price tag and difficult trade-offs. The article then outlines the challenges in measuring the cross-border economic impact of piracy and counterfeiting. As an illustration, the article discusses the ongoing effort by the US International Trade Commission to measure the economic impact of intellectual property infringement in China on the US economy. The article concludes with an analysis of the various metrics that can be or have been used to develop cross-country comparative analyses. It highlights the continuous disagreement across nations over what metrics should be used. It also suggests new areas researchers can explore in their continuous search for a set of mutually satisfactory metrics that advance the international intellectual property enforcement debate

Postcolonial Piracy

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity. Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local