A University of Miami law professor recently offered reasons why that the public should consider extending copyright law to include “collectively held cultural identities.”
In an excerpt of her paper “Protecting Cultural Personality” in Race, Racism and the Law, J. Janewa Osei-Tutu notes companies such as Timbuk and Louis Vuitton “have designed and marketed clothing based on traditional ethnic clothing styles or symbols” … but without the “knowledge, consent, or involvement of the cultural group” in question.
Osei-Tutu argues intellectual property laws are “underinclusive — at least in relation to valuable intangible cultural heritage from indigenous communities and local communities from the global south [which] allows corporations and those outside the community to capture and monetize this unprotected resource, which means that it is exposed and subject to misappropriation.”
Sounds like bullshit, dunnit? Gets deeper, though:
In order to protect “cultural personality rights,” Osei-Tutu (pictured) says cultural groups should have “sufficient boundaries and markers, or indicia” by which to identify them.
Groups can be “self-defining,” and it’s “not necessary for the public to have significant knowledge of the group.”
Sure, just make it up as you go along. Okay, I’ll play.
Supposing I composed and released a blues song in the style of, oh, B.B. King. (Note: “in the style of”, not a copy of.) Am I making an appropriation of the blues culture — defined on the fly as something that is inherently of Southern Black origin? According to this college harpy professor, probably so.
Fine. But let’s just examine that “blues culture” thing for a moment. It was indisputably a lament, born of a race’s suffering, and played on either piano or else guitar by Black musical luminaries such as Otis Spann and Muddy Waters, respectively.
On the piano? You mean, that keyboard instrument invented and devised in 1700 by Italian Bartolomeo Cristofiori, a White man? And about the guitar: the “classical” acoustic version was invented by inter alia Spaniard Antonio de Torres Jurado, and its electrical counterpart by inter alia Adolph Rickenbacker and Leo Fender (to name but two). Regardless, both instruments were invented by White men of European heritage.
If Spann and Waters had had to operate under those pesky “cultural appropriation” restrictions, it’s safe to say that the blues would still be being sung in Black Christian churches and not in concerts all over the world.
Wait: did I say “churches”?
Doesn’t look too much like something African (or African-American), does it?
Of course, I’m just screwing around here. But at the heart of this little piece of satire is a very serious message to the racist hustlers like this Osei-Tutu creature:
Stop fucking around and claiming that “cultural appropriation” is somehow an evil thing. That, or don’t wear jeans (invented by White Jewish guy Levi Strauss) ever again.
And steer clear of fried chicken, while you’re about it, or else the Romans are going to declare a classical fatwa on your ass.
I could go on all day, but I think you get my point.