In this article, I am interested in exploring the legal doctrine of copyright from the standpoint of a postcolonial critic. According to Shelley Wright, there is a ‘deep and continuing grip of colonial thinking on all systems currently in place, from the personal and local to the global.’ And the law of copyright is no exception. Like other areas of intellectual property, copyright — as a Western philosophical idea, is deeply imbued with the values of the European Enlightenment, liberalism, and a society founded on a print-based culture. As Wrights suggests, copyright continues to be one of ‘the quintessential representations of the modern, public world of bourgeois expansion, male dominance and European colonial influence in the creation of political and economic systems in Europe and the colonies.’ Indeed, the Western history of copyright is inextricably tied to the Western history of colonialism. A major argument in this article is that copyright (like other forms of intellectual property) is not a natural right, but instead embodies a particular set of values and assumptions — such as the need to commodify ideas, and also the expression of those ideas. As a product of the European Enlightenment, the concept of copyright has been infused with the ideals of the liberal legal tradition, and these ideals — such as ‘private property’, ‘authorship’ and ‘possessive individualism’ are not universal principles of property law, but instead are Western ones. Consequently, the supposedly universally-shared view of copyright law embodied in international agreements such as the Berne Convention and the TRIPS Agreement are not simply ‘agreements’, but rather are multifaceted projects (or dominant narratives) which are laden with values stemming from particular cultural traditions, and which have evolved from particular historical moments in Western history. However, while these values have been packaged and exported around the globe based on their apparent universality, it is significant to note that copyright remains a foreign concept in many cultures. Indeed, a number of societies take a radically different view as to ‘what constitutes property or what may rightfully be the subject of private ownership.’ Several cultures also consider ‘copying’ or sharing ideas within a community as a sign of respect and recognition — not as piracy, or a violation of private property rights. Before moving on to explore the concept of copyright law in more detail, I should outline my reasons for wishing to scrutinise the laws in this area using a postcolonial lens. Copyright is a multi-billion dollar global industry, which has increasingly become an enormous source of revenue for countries of the North. From a postcolonial perspective, the export of copyright products raises particular concerns as these items are not simply just another trade commodity, but emblematise the exporting cultures’ values and traditions. In other words, Disney movies and MTV songs are not simply just another product because they represent the cultural signs and symbols of the dominant narrative. Due to the enormous volume and dominant position of Western popular culture on a global scale, critics have labeled this essentially one-way traffic as a form of ‘cultural imperialism’ in this postcolonial era. As Fredric Jameson suggests, the export of American culture around the globe has had a far deeper impact than earlier forms of colonisation, imperialism or simple tourism, as these cultural goods (along with agribusiness and weapons) constitute the principal economic exports for the US. Moreover, the current imbalance in global information flows is in many ways merely an extension of the exploitative colonial past. For this reason, Philip Altbach asserts that ‘[c]opyright must not be seen in isolation from issues of access to knowledge, the needs of Third World nations, and the broad history of colonialism and exploitation.’ I also wish to examine the concept of copyright law in more detail in order to partially fill the gap in understanding of the negative impact of an overly prescriptive international copyright regime. This is important, as most of the opposition in the late 1990s to the international intellectual property regime primarily focused on the dire effects of patents for countries in the South. This article will begin by exploring the concept of copyright law as essentially a Western idea, and then move on to discuss copyright and the colonial process, the Berne Convention and the TRIPS Agreement as colonial (and postcolonial) constructs, and the role of international copyright law in continually othering the South in the global publishing and software industries
