Dommann, Monika --- "Lost in Tradition? Reconsidering the History of Folklore and its Legal Protection Since 1800" [2008] ELECD 322; in Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira (eds), "Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment

Editor(s): Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847209214

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: Lost in Tradition? Reconsidering the History of Folklore and its Legal Protection Since 1800

Author(s): Dommann, Monika

Number of pages: 14

Extract:

1. Lost in tradition? Reconsidering the
history of folklore and its legal
protection since 1800
Monika Dommann
In January 1954, Billboard, the leading US music and entertainment journal,
reported on an exclusive contract between the American record company
Tempo Records and the government-owned radio station in Afghanistan,
Radio Kabul. The contract guaranteed exclusive recording rights in
Afghanistan. During a five-month trip around India, Pakistan and Afghanistan,
Irving Fogel, President of Tempo Records at the time, collected original
indigenous music. The record company planned to release the records in
Afghanistan and the United States, where universities and colleges showed
particular interest in obtaining the recordings for their collections. Further use
of the music by the television and motion picture industries was intended.1
At least two issues concerning the above are worth further consideration.
The first issue is related to technology: formerly insubstantial and fluent, only
preserved by oral transmission from generation to generation, music became
tangible and fixed by the recording process. Hitherto embedded in local
cultures, music was decontextualized. It became extremely mobile and entan-
gled with new milieus such as universities, museum collections, radio stations
and even the motion picture and television industries. After the music had been
recorded, it became what the French philosopher and cultural anthropologist
Bruno Latour calls "immutable mobiles".2 Music could be used and reused on
a global scale as an object of scientific research and as a source for economic
exploitation.
The second issue is related to law. Radio Kabul ...