Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesconventional copyright. It is apparent that both of these issues will profoundlyinfluence the role of copyright in cultural diversity policies, as well.First, modern technologies have created unprecedented opportunities for the disseminationof knowledge and information. The growth of communications technologyand the increasing availability and sophistication of technologies for reproducingcreative works have brought new dimensions of access to knowledge.Indeed, the explosive growth of technological capacities in these areas threatens tooverwhelm the capacity of regulators to control the flow of information. In lieu ofregulation, technology itself may be increasingly compelled to respond directly tothis situation. Since the function of controlling the spread of information in societyis a basic function of copyright law, the power of technological growth to outpaceregulatory development ultimately threatens to render certain aspects ofcopyright protection obsolete. 1The difficulties of regulators in keeping pace with technological change have seriousimplications for cultural diversity, and for the development of policies to promoteculture. To an important degree, the success of groups in preserving and promotingtheir cultural identities will be influenced by their ability to adapt to thenew technological environment. However, regulation which lags significantlybehind technological developments may impede this process. Cultural policyshould assist groups in their efforts to modernise – or, at a minimum, it should aimto create a neutral legal environment as far as possible. Moreover, policies whichare designed to promote cultural diversity must also be flexible enough to accommodatethe evolving relationship between culture and technology.Apart from the involvement of technology in disseminating cultural knowledge,technological development is also implicated directly in the creative process.Technological growth provides new means of creating traditional kinds of creativeworks, and it also creates an opportunity for technology to manifest itself directlyin creative works, as a product of the creative process. A number of historicalexamples demonstrate the ways in which technology and culture develop together.For example, the development of photography and film have led to the motion picture,which has been famously hailed as the one art form uniquely created by thetwentieth-century mind. Copyright scholars observe that, in situations of technologicaltransformation, both the identity of the author and the nature of the relationshipbetween the author and the work are suffused with ambiguity. The capacityof conventional copyright concepts to accommodate these new forms ofcultural diversity has yet to be established.Future directions for researchThe community of intellectual property scholars has been quick to recognise theimportance of current copyright developments for culture. Scholars have shown__________1. Christie (1995: 522, 527-530) considers the various positions on the viability of copyright in the newtechnological environment, emphasising that, in spite of some scholarly scepticism, the existing frameworkof the law is inevitably brought into issue by technological change.144