Discovering Levinas

THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY, including much of my own work (Darnell 1988, 1990), has emphasized the explanatory potential of biography. Intellectual historians are inclined to attribute a considerable degree of agency to individual academics who have been influential in their chosen fields. Autobiography, for many historicist purposes, has the added advantage of revealing the motivations and intentions of the actor whose life experience structures the telling of a disciplinary story. Such unexamined privileging of the autonomy of key individuals in creating institutions, social networks, and theoretical paradigms might lead us to re-examine the canonical work of Franz Boas on what Americans refer to as the Northwest Coast or of Edward Sapir on what Canadians of his time called the West Coast. Despite the fact that 95 percent of the Northwest Coast is located in Canada, the American-centred geographic term has persisted in both countries. We might expect the two founding fathers to represent American

A condition for the effective integration of Eurasian Economic Union member states economies is creating a set of mechanisms for the use of intellectual property objects in modern circumstances. With significant intellectual potential existing in the EAEU countries, the process of commercialization and use of intellectual property objects is not carried out sufficiently. Considering the main purpose of the Union's functioning, this problem has to be solved comprehensively and consistently. The article presents the main results of study of customs regulation system of goods containing intellectual property objects crossborder movement in the context of Eurasian integration. It is noted that the violation of intellectual property rights occurs not only among competing companies as a plagiarism or industrial espionage, but also within framework of agreements concluded between copyright holders and users of intellectual property rights. The EAEU countries cooperate and organize interaction of authorized bodies also to form a unified system of intellectual property rights protection within the EAEU, SCO, BRICS, as well as the WTO. In order to improve the system of customs control of goods containing intellectual property objects, constant adjustments and modernization of methods for controlling the intellectual property objects movement across the customs border of the EAEU are required to ensure the maximum possible protection of intellectual property holders from illegal actions of third parties. The publication was made within the framework of the state assignment for 2021 No. 0851-2020-0034

The justification for statutory copyright protection seems self-evident. Creators of copyrightable works invest substantial time, skill, and capital into the content they create, and therefore should have some legal recourse if others profit from their works unfairly or use them contrary to the creator's original intent. Yet, in the more than three-hundred-year history of copyright law key issues surrounding authorship, ownership, and public use of creative works continue to persist. This suggests that legal protection alone cannot construct an optimum environment in which creativity can occur. It also suggests that the theorization of the essential nature of creative work is still incomplete. This article will trace an intellectual history of copyright's theorization in two major theoretical frameworks: classical liberalism and cultural Marxism. Based upon this review, it will suggest a third framework, ritual economy, as capable of theorizing the economics of creative work more completely. It will also argue the necessity of rehabilitating authorship in theoretical literature, and will begin to develop an ontological foundation for legitimate authorship by drawing upon the ritual economy paradigm. It concludes with an application of the ritual economic view to the illustrative example of the popular music industry.IntroductionThe Statute of Anne, ratified into English law in 1710, is considered a seminal early copyright statute.1 It began with a statement of the central issue that it was enacted to address:Whereas printers, booksellers, and other persons have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing, reprinting, and publishing... without the consent of the authors or proprietors...to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families.2In the context of the time, this taking of liberties represented a cultural shift away from the practice of honoring the copyrights of authors as a moral-or at least a contractual-obligation. The technological innovation of the printing press, the rise of a literate public, and the economic opportunities in providing that public with written content turned a matter of honor into a matter of money.3 The primary beneficiaries of this turn were not necessarily authors themselves, but those with sufficient wealth and infrastructure to capitalize upon the production and dissemination of creative works. For authors and their designated rights holders, infringement had become detrimental enough that Parliament enacted legislation ostensibly on their behalf.Yet, after three centuries of statutory copyright protection the creative industries continue to operate in an environment where content creators supply the raw material-in the form of literature, artwork, music, photography, films, software, and other copyright protected mediums- while receiving only a fraction of the financial benefit their works produce. Technological advances may have made the shift from a copyright system based on moral rights and contracts to one based on case law and statute necessary, but that shift has done as much to entrench the power of those with the means to capitalize on the creative works of others as it has to effectively protect content creators. This is a result of the inherent paradox of legal protection. At the moment a citizen is protected from harm by law, they are also rendered dependent upon the State for the enforcement of that protection. Thus, while infringers of copyright may ultimately be held liable for their transgressions, liability can only be determined by time-consuming litigation that keeps copyright holders from pursuing their normal course of work, by an expensive reliance upon the legal system for adequate representation, and by submission to the uncertainty of the judicial apparatus that may or may not rule in the rights holder's favor.The entrenchment of power in the creative industries is also accomplished by the specialization of labor. …