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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideas and ideals of authorship and the discourse on property rights that emerged in parallel since the 18thcentury have come to form the bedrock of copyright law. Critical copyright scholars argue that this construction of authorship and ownership contributes to individualisation and privatisation of artistic works that disregards the collective aspects of creativity. It also embodies a certain kind of authorial character-or “author function” as Michel Foucault puts it-imbued with racial and gendered powers and privileges. While the gendered and racialised biases of intellectual property rights are well documented within copyright research, the commodification of ideas and cultural expressions relies on individualisation of creativity that is significant not only to the cultural economy but also to the 20th-century notion of the entrepreneur as the protagonist of capitalism. This article relates the idea of the entrepreneur to the deconstruction of authorship that was initiated by Foucault and Roland Barthes in the late 1960s, and the critique of an author-centred IPR regime developed by law scholars in the 1990s. It asks if and how the deconstruction of the author as a cultural and ideological persona that underpins the privatisation of immaterial resources can help us understand the construction and function of the entrepreneur in extractive capitalism.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that since genetic resources carry cultural significance to many Indigenous communities, the protection of genetic resources should be considered in relation to the protection of Indigenous cultural heritage. It compares international regulations of genetic resources and associated 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 discusses how attempts to decolonise the regulation of genetic resources are impeded by two dilemmas that have also affected UNESCO and WIPO's attempts to safeguard traditional cultural expressions. The first dilemma concerns the problems of promoting Indigenous self-recognition within a system of governance based on national agency and sovereignty. The second dilemma concerns how international regulations are based on a Western ontology that polarises natural and cultural resources, which has resulted in a reluctance to address intellectual property rights within the CBD. Exploring parallels between the regulation of genetic resources and traditional cultural expressions provides new perspectives on the difficulties facing the decolonisation of the protection of Indigenous resources and the implementation of Indigenous data sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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