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Chronicle Pepperpot July 26, 2015
opyright and you (Part 2)
(The following is extract of an interview with Ms Abiola Inniss in Georgetown, Guyana, 2014. Inniss is a leading analyst and author on Intellectual Property and a special consultant to WIPO UN on Caribbean Copyright issues)
• Petamber Persaud (PP) - Atthis time, let’s look at the direct impact of copyright on three areas. Tell us, show us, how important copyright is to one - the lay person, two – the creator/ artist and three – to the country, the development of the country. • Abiola Inniss (AI) - First of all, you need to have a cumulative policy which allows you to understand what copyright is all about and why it is important to you. If your writers, do not write, then you don’t enjoy books; if your songwriters do not produce, then you don’t have entertainment; if your actors and playwrights don’t come up with ideas, then we lose parts of our culture – you have to remember always our culture is documented by our writers, some of our consciousness is created by people who think about things like that and develop cultural awareness. What do we do for them? Take their works, give them nothing and then let them go. It takes a lot to be a writer. • (PP) - So what I’m getting here is that if there is nothing in it for me as a writer, singer, actor, then I would not produce. • (AI) - You probably will produce. But it is better if we respect those persons, and allow them to make a livelihood so that our culture and our national consciousness can flourish. • (PP) - It is one thing to say that but what is happening on the ground? • (AI) - Now as to what’s happening on the ground and what I’ve been doing and what I like to do is to walk among the people, go to the market and mingle and see how people feel about things. Then you get an idea what the public interest is before you can think about what public policy can become, and then move towards other stages like what laws would help create good public measures. So it moves one stage to the other then the other and it comes all the way back down. If people don’t buy in that this idea is important, then they wouldn’t do
on us the creators of words…
Ms Abiola Inniss anything about it; they wouldn’t be interested and the whole project would fail. •
(PP)
- Show us an example.
• (AI) - This is what happened in Kenya, in order to comply with the World Organisation TRIPS arrangement, they just put in a set of regulations and rules only to find they had to continuously go back and take out and patch and fix because it doesn’t work. • first?
(PP)
• (AI) work first. •
(PP)
- So you have to do the groundwork
- Yes, you have to do the ground-
- And ensure there is a balance?
• (AI) - And ensure there is a balance. So the artists and creators where you don’t have your policy makers interested in this subject, you have to put it to them – this is not good for our national livelihood… •
(PP)
- I’m getting the feeling the onus is
• (AI) - Well, unfortunately, it has to be on someone. And if the someone doesn’t take up the responsibility, then there will have to be some kind of compromise or compensation. So it has to start somewhere. And we need to focus on it quickly. So if you in a family situation where someone is not pulling his weight, then someone else will have to compensate for that. In these circumstances, it is not going to go along the prefect route so you have to take up the slack and make something of it where the government or governments are not cognisant of what is needed. • (PP) - Are you suggesting that we are not aware of something as important as copyright and intellectual property rights? • (AI) - In the Caribbean Region, it is not that they are not cognisant of what is needed; they are unaware of how to go about it. This is where I come in and where other consultants come in so we help them to plan policies, to examine it from a scientific perspective – this is not guesswork, there is no guesswork in any of this. There are methods that are used to evaluate what exact value copyright and other aspects of intellectual property rights have so they would know how to incorporate into their national economic plan. ► Continued on page V