On the Tension between Copyright and the Conceptions of Collective Creation in some Mapuche Poetry

Abstract

America has many Indigenous peoples in its territory, with their own cultural, artistic and intellectual ways of communicating. In this sense, the Mapuche people, who traditionally lived in the South of Chile and Argentina, have faced a dichotomous process of integration and resistance, in which the transmission of values and cultural/artistic elements across generations has been fundamental to preserving a common cultural base. Those values have been transmitted, among other things, through poetry. However, it seems that some cultural expressions find it very difficult to accommodate the rigid legal structure of Copyright. One of the main reasons is that Copyright understands creation as something individual, or at least as made by specific individuals. But the Mapuche understands that some of their artistic creations belong to the community as a whole, and not to one individual. This article attempts to show the existing tension between the individualistic tendency of the legal framing of Copyright and the collective characteristics of Mapuche poetry, to propose a review of the adequacy of Copyright norms to regulate those specific and traditional cultural expressions.