Creative Economy: A Feasible Development Option

and made commercially available by the likes of IBM orNovell, is available under the GNU General PublicLicense. 10 National copyright legislation is obliged toenforce and respect the licence conditions as declared inthese and other open public licenses, and recent cases haveupheld the rights of the copyright owners distributing worksunder alternative free and/or open licences. 116.4.5 Enforcement of copyrightThe acquisition of copyrights is of little economicvalue if these rights cannot be enforced effectively. The credibilityof the system depends to a considerable extent on theenforceability of the rights it confers. Well-functioningenforcement mechanisms are the best means to limit thenumber of violations of copyrights and to ensure that rightsholders and society as a whole can reap the benefits from theintellectual property system. However, this is another area inwhich more transparency is required. One of the main complaintsfrom artists and creators in developing countries isthe lack of data related to the real rights transactions. Anumber of questions have no simple answers: What are thevalues of rights transferred inside corporations from theconsuming to the producing country? Who benefits from it?In most cases, the rights holders are not the authors. Thus itis imperative to ensure that creators really benefit from theearnings of their work. If the real problems could be solved,this would encourage better enforcement in developingcountries. Therefore, the key issue is not only enforcementbut also the ambiguities of the current IPR regime, whichdeserve to be carefully addressed by governments.In considering the protection and enforcement ofcopyright and related rights, piracy appears as one of thecentral issues. All kinds of works are at risk of unauthorizeduse. Music, books, videos, DVDs and even craft design arecopied illegally. WIPO argues that in developing economies,as a result of the flooding of markets with cheap “copyrightfree”foreign products, domestic creators and producers losetheir competitiveness, which in turn endangers cultural diversityand national identity. This is a huge challenge in manycountries, and the argument is that countries where piracy isrampant may forego opportunities for growth and developmenton several levels, both tangible and intangible, since itdestabilizes the local creative industries and undermines theefforts of creative entrepreneurs and businesses. Inadequateenforcement of copyright limits incentives to developcreative products, especially for small and medium-sizedenterprises. Other critiques point to the need to review thecurrent IPR legislation to address the root of the issue, notjust the consequences.6The role of intellectual property in the creative economy6.5 The economics of copyrightCopyrighted works, like other intangible goods, sufferfrom what economists call the public goods problem: theyare non-rivalries and non-excludable goods. This means thattheir use by one person does not reduce their usefulness forother persons; thus an unlimited number of people may consumethe work without using it up. In addition, while thecost of creating copyright goods is often high, the cost ofreproducing them is low. This leads to an economic disincentiveto commercialize new works.The limited monopoly granted by copyright laws providescopyright owners with the legal entitlement to excludeothers from enjoying the copyrighted work. In the case oftraditional copyright where the terms and conditions are notspecified beyond the designation “Copyright [date]”, “©”or eventually “All rights reserved”, anyone else who wants touse the work needs to seek permission from the owner. Yetwhile these rights may be exclusive, they are not absolute andsome national IPR legislation provides limitations andexceptions to help to keep the copyright system balanced toavoid the costs of an overly extensive set of rights. Theseso-called “fair-use” rights indicate a permissible degree ofcopying, in part or in full, within the family or householdcircle, for creating backups in the production of comic andsatirical material, and for the purpose of study and academicresearch. Creative Commons licences refers to a set ofliberal copyright licences, often referred to as “copyleft”,that instruct the users of the work as to which conditions(none, some, any/all) govern copying, attribution and the10 http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.11 See http://gpl-violations.org/about.html.CREATIVE ECONOMY REPORT 2010177