Folklore Protection in the Eritrean Context: Legal Issues and Choices

Abstract

∗ LLB (University of Asmara), LLM (Cornell University), JSD candidate, Cornell Law School. 1 Copyright law is generally categorised into economic and moral rights of authors. Almost all countries of the world today protect the economic rights of authors. Certain countries, for instance the US, have a very limited moral rights concept. One of the challenges that creators of works of authorship suffer in this age of technology is that it has become so easy and cheap to reproduce works of authorship. The cost of producing a song is much more than burning it on a CD. In addition, the intangibility of the property rights in creative works also allows the non-rivalrous consumption of the good. This non-rivalrous character does not deter the buyer of an original CD from allowing his or her friend to make a copy of it. Both the original and copy CDs can be consumed at the same time without reducing the value of the original CD for the original buyer. 2 John Stuart Mill, the grand philosopher of liberalism, explained how intellectual property rights can incentivise creations. He emphasised the need for granting authors a limited time monopoly for their creations. The debate about whether granting authors limited monopoly rights serves as an incentive for creativity is as prevalent today as it was in the 1800s (Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy (2002), p. 9, available at http://www.iprcommission.org/papers/pdfs/final_report/Ch1final.pdf (accessed 8 September 2010)). However, it is not necessarily true to assume that people invest time and effort to create works because of the incentives granted to them by copyright laws. The Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to making access to information easy. For instance, the movement with Mozilla Firefox and other open source software is one of them. For further discussion on the works of the Creative Commons movement, see http://creativecommons.org/about/ (accessed 3 June 2010). Contemporary copyright law grants limited monopoly of protection in the sense that the copyright holder does not have absolute rights. The term of protection is limited in time. It is also limited for certain forms of exploitations that fall within the general exceptions of copyright laws. See, for instance, section 102 of the 17 USC (United States Code). 3 Historically, in the 1950s there was a prevalent view that the rationale for intellectual property rights protection was mainly to protect against retaliation from foreign governments. For instance,