Search

This article discusses §51 of the Swedish copyright law, known as “the protection of classics”, as a cultural policy intervention. §51 protects culturally significant works by deceased authors against reproductions that are considered offensive, even if the works are in the public domain and thus not protected by copyright. The article provides a brief overview of the origin of §51 and analyses potential cases of violation between 1960 and 2020, where the Swedish authorities threatened to sue for infringement against §51 but refrained for various reasons. It also considers a recent case, the Swedish Academy (Svenska Akademien) v. Nordfront, where §51 was, for the first time, tried in court. The cases involving §51 are diverse and the motivations for suing (or not) are different. However, taken together, these examples reflect changing cultural norms and values in Sweden during the twentieth century. This article will show how the value system that has shaped the protection of classics, and its subsequent use is aligned with a Swedish cultural policy discourse where priorities have shifted from protecting fine art against popular culture, to countering the negative consequences of commercialism, and to promoting multiculturalism and inclusion., Klassikerskyddet: Kollektiva rättigheter, kulturarv och upphovsrätt

In the mid-19th century Swedish copyright law was regulated in the Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1812, which merely stated that ‘Any writing is the property of the author or its legal proprietor’. This implied that copyright was to be seen as any other property right and that the ownership of texts was unlimited in time. This changed in 1841 when Sweden passed an addition to the copyright paragraph stating that copyright protection expired if the copyright holder or its heirs did not publish or reissue the works within 20 years. Since the copyright holders were still allowed to republish the work as many times as they wished, the law in practice still allowed for an infinite extension of the copyright protection. This revision was nevertheless principally important since it was the first time that Swedish law acknowledged that literary property needed to be addressed differently from material property. The discussion preceding the revision also introduced the interests of the public in Swedish copyright law for the first time, as it referred to the need to make literature publicly available as an argument for imposing potential limitations on the terms of protection., Please cite as: Fredriksson, Martin (2023) ‘Commentary on the Swedish Ordinance on the Limitation of Terms of Protection (1841)’, in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1810 was not only a return to the liberal ideals that shaped the famous Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1766 (sometimes referred to as the world’s first freedom of the press act), but it was also, arguably, Sweden’s first copyright regulation. This was indeed the first time that authors’ rights to the works they produced were acknowledged in Swedish law, although it was only mentioned in one paragraph, stating that ‘Any writing is the property of the author or its legal proprietor.’ The inclusion of authors’ rights in the Freedom of the Press Ordinance was largely uncontroversial and uncontested, and this commentary argues that it was most likely included because many of those involved in drafting the legislation were not only politicians but also authors and intellectuals. As such, they were familiar with the debates on authors’ rights in England and on the continent at the time. However, unlike in other European countries, the legislators did not elaborate on the nature and limitations of literary ownership, but merely assumed that the ownership of texts was to be equated with any other form of material property. Consequently, early Swedish copyright came to be entirely unlimited in time., Please cite as: Fredriksson, Martin (2023) ‘Commentary on Swedish Freedom of the Press Ordinance (1810)', in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

For most of the 19th century Swedish copyright law was primarily regulated by the Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1812, which merely stated that ‘Any writing is the property of the author or its legal proprietor’. It was not until 1877 that Sweden passed a separate, comprehensive copyright law. This was initially motivated by the fact that copyright was becoming much too extensive and complicated an issue to be regulated in a constitutional law. Apart from addressing many of the practicalities surrounding the exchange and sale of literary rights, the 1877 Copyright Act also introduced two important novelties in Swedish copyright law. First, it imposed a fixed time limitation on the protection of copyright; while the previous law had, in practice, allowed for an eternal extension of copyright protection, the new act limited this to 50 years after the death of the author. Secondly, the 1877 Copyright Act provided a certain, although very limited, copyright protection for translated works stating that original authors retained their copyright for works translated from Swedish into Norwegian or Danish. This was the most controversial part of the new law as many publishers saw this as a limitation of what they thought of as their ‘freedom to translate’ which, they argued, could limit public access to literature., Please cite as: Fredriksson, Martin (2023) ‘Commentary on The Swedish Copyright Act (1877)’, in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

Digital marketplaces are standard and pervasive sites to trade and exchange material consumer goods worldwide. Yet the media characteristics of different, situated marketplaces have received relatively sporadic attention from the field of media and communication studies, despite the otherwise prominent disciplinary interest in digital technologies, platforms and processes of mediatisation. This paper coalesces perspectives from social, geography and retail studies with mediatisation approaches to extend a theorisation of digital marketplaces as 'mediatised marketplaces', focusing on the discussion of interactions between digital media and place involved in the distribution of material goods. We use illustrative examples of two different local marketplaces - the Swedish Tradera and Facebook Marketplace - to demonstrate how mediatised marketplaces challenge a range of distinctions, including between offline and online, material and immaterial, local and global. Mediatised marketplaces such as Tradera and Facebook Marketplace are grounded in place and local market identities, even as they operate on or are owned by global platforms; they rely on communicative as much as logistical functionalities of media; and are transformative of media and consumption practices. The paper contributes to studies of mediatisation and its impacts.

This article analyses how local, national and international interests are reflected in India’s attempts to protect traditional knowledge through the formation of a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). It compares how the digital library is contextualised within India’s domestic policy with how it is presented to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The article argues that WIPO has endorsed the Indian initiative and embraced the promotion of protective databases as an uncontroversial tool that diverts attention from more contested forms of traditional knowledge protection. Consequently, India has been able to use WIPO as a platform to promote itself and the TKDL to the global community. Domestically, however, the library serves other purposes. Since it systematically documents a vast body of traditional medical knowledge, Indian authorities can use the library to claim that knowedge as part of a national cultural heritage, and as a source of scientific innovations to the economic and social benefit of the country. In that regard, the TKDL reflects an interplay among local, national and international interests, where the goal of protecting the traditional knowledge of indigenous and local communities against misappropriation risks being co-opted to serve national purposes., Funding: European Research Council (ERC) under the European UnionEuropean Research Council (ERC) [741095PASSIMERC-2016-AdG], PASSIM: Patens as Scientific Information 1895-2010 (Grant Agreement No. 741095-PASSIMERC-2016-AdG)

Organization scholars have extensively studied both the politics of organization and the organization of politics. Contributing to the latter, we argue for further and deeper consideration of political parties, since: (1) parties illuminate organizational dynamics of in- and exclusion; (2) internal struggles related to the constitution of identities, practices, and procedures are accentuated in parties; (3) the study of parties allow for the isolation of processes of normative and affective commitment; (4) parties prioritize and intensify normative control mechanisms; (5) party organizing currently represents an example of profound institutional change, as new (digital) formations challenge old bureaucratic models. Consequently, we argue that political parties should be seen as ‘critical cases’ of organizing, meaning that otherwise commonplace phenomena are intensified and exposed in parties. This allows researchers to use parties as magnifying glasses for zooming-in on organizational dynamics that may be suppressed or concealed by the seemingly non-political façade of many contemporary organizations. In conclusion, we argue that organization scholars are in a privileged position to investigate how political parties function today and how their democratic potential can be improved in the future. To this end, we call on Organization and Management Studies to engage actively with alternative parties in an attempt to explore and promote progressive change within the formal political system., Funding: Velux Fonden [00013146]

This article applies a cultural perspective on § 51of the Swedish Copyright Act, which prohibits therendering of works in the public domain ‘in a waythat offends the interests of spiritual cultivation’(SFS 1960:729). This so called ‘protection of clas-sics’ was formulated in the 1950s to protect classicalworks against derogatory interpretations, such aspopular cultural adaptions. § 51 has rarely beenapplied, but in 2021 it was for the first time triedin court as the nationalist website Nordfront wasaccused of violating §51 by publishing works bythree prominent romanticist poets in a contextbordering on hate speech. The court ruled that thepublication was not a violation of § 51, which callsthe future of the protection of classics into question.Even though §51 might soon be obsolete, it raises anumber of questions regarding the relation betweenlaw and culture. This article discusses what theprotection of classics and the Nordfront case cantell us about cultural change in postwar Sweden if itis approached as a cultural rather than a legal textand studied not primarily as a legislative processbut as a process of meaning making. The articlemakes no attempts to conduct such an analysis butrather aims to introduce the perspective and presentpreliminary reflections on how the formulation anduse of protection of classics reflects changing con-ceptions of cultural norms and values., The Protection of Classics: Collective Claims to Cultural Heritage in Copyright Law

This article analyzes India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) as a potential intervention in the administration of patent law. The TKDL is a database including a vast body of traditional medical knowledge from India, aiming to prevent the patenting and misappropriation of that knowledge. This article contextualizes the TKDL in relation to documentation theory as well as to existing research on the uses of databases to protect traditional knowledge. It explores the TKDL’s potential consequences for India’s traditional medical knowledge and the wider implications that traditional knowledge databases can have for the safeguarding of traditional knowledge in general. The article concludes that on the one hand the TKDL bridges the gap between the main branches of Indian traditional medicine and the formal knowledge system of International Patent Classifications. Furthermore, it has also inspired revisions of the International Patent Classification system, which makes it better adapted to incorporate traditional medical knowledge. On the other hand, critical research on traditional knowledge documentation argues that traditional knowledge databases, like the TKDL, can decontextualize the knowledge they catalogue and dispossess its original owners. The TKDL, however, also fits into a national, Indian agenda of documenting and modernizing traditional medicine that predates the formation of the TKDL by several decades and challenges the dichotomy between traditional and scientific knowledge systems that originally motivated the formation of the TKDL., Funding: European Research Council (ERC) under the European UnionEuropean Research Council (ERC) [741095-PASSIMERC-2016-AdG], Passim: Patents as Scientific Information 1895-2020

This article argues that since genetic resources carry cultural significanceto many Indigenous communities, the protection of genetic resourcesshould be considered in relation to the protection of Indigenous culturalheritage. It compares international regulations of genetic resources andassociated traditional knowledge to those of traditional cultural expressions,focusing particularly on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)and its implementation through the Nagoya Protocol. The article discusseshow attempts to decolonise the regulation of genetic resources areimpeded by two dilemmas that have also affected UNESCO and WIPO’sattempts to safeguard traditional cultural expressions. The first dilemmaconcerns the problems of promoting Indigenous self-recognition withina system of governance based on national agency and sovereignty.The second dilemma concerns how international regulations are basedon a Western ontology that polarises natural and cultural resources, whichhas resulted in a reluctance to address intellectual property rights withinthe CBD. Exploring parallels between the regulation of genetic resourcesand traditional cultural expressions provides new perspectives on thedifficulties facing the decolonisation of the protection of Indigenousresources and the implementation of Indigenous data sovereignty., Funding agencies:Swedish Research CouncilSwedish Research Council; Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions [E0633901], Commons and Commodities