Alan STORY

An alternative primer on
national and international copyright law
in the global South:
eighteen questions and answers

Alan Story*
September 2009

José Guadalupe Posada

DOWNLOAD:

Primer- Text only (596 kb)
Primer - Cover and text (3.29mb)


ABSTRACT: What are the basic nuts and bolts (and traps and dead ends) of copyright law? Who owns copyright (hint: it is usually not the author)? What rights do users have? Do international copyright conventions work in the interest of the peoples of the world, and, if not, why not? These are a few of the questions that are taken up and answered in “An alternative primer on national and international copyright law in the global South: eighteen questions and answers” published by the CopySouth Research Group. The intended audience: librarians, musicians, downloaders and book readers, information activists, students, and others who want to know how the copyright system actually works in practice in your country of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In 68 pages of straightforward and non-legalistic writing, this primer tries to unpack and explain a number of both simple and complicated concepts. You will NOT find it on the list of texts recommended by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)…. but your comments via this website are welcome (see comment form below).

*Alan Story teaches intellectual property law at Kent Law School in the United Kingdom.

Abstract: This 2003 article challenges some of the conventional wisdom in the field of international copyright law and attempts to show why this system predominantly works for the benefit of wealthy media corporations (and other copyright owners) in rich industrial countries and NOT in interests of people living in the global South. It explains that the concept of “national treatment” promotes, rather than reduces, discrimination and why the metaphor of “balance” misleads us about the very nature of this system. In fact, the 1886 Berne Convention is a colonial relic and should be repealed. “Burn Berne” was published in Volume 40, Issue 3 of the Houston Law Review (in the United States) in 2003.

Alan Story is a senior lecturer in intellectual property law at Kent Law School, United Kingdom, and a long-time Copysouther. He can be contacted at: a.c.story@kent.ac.uk

DOWNLOAD "Burn Berne" (PDF, 240 kilobytes)