Copyrighting Tradition in the Internet Age: Creativity, Authorship and Folklore

A transcript for this episode can be found online, here.
Intro and outro music provided by Zazim.  

This recording of the 2016 David Buchan Lecture comes from the Elphinstone Institute Archives. It was delivered by Valdimar Hafstein, Professor in the Department of Ethnology, Folklore, and Museum Studies at the University of Iceland. Since completing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004, he has published a number of articles and edited volumes on folklore, intangible heritage, international heritage politics, cultural property, and copyright in traditional knowledge. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, Croatian, and Danish. Valdimar is a former president of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) and a former Chair of the Icelandic Commission for UNESCO.

His lecture, 'Copyrighting Tradition in the Internet Age: Creativity, Authorship and Folklore' explores the entanglements between creativity, authorship, digital culture, and copyright law.

The lecture's abstract reads as follows: 

Should we copyright culture? How can one compose a one-hundred-year-old traditional lullaby? Who owns Cinderella? And what would the Brothers Grimm say?

What is the historical provenance of such Catch-22s? While we may not resolve them in this talk, the lessons we learn from picking them apart can inform our thinking about creativity and agency in contemporary culture.

In 1844, Hans Christian Andersen accused the Brothers Grimm of stealing his tale ‘The Princess and the Pea’. That Andersen elsewhere attributes this tale to oral tradition (he heard it as a child) seems not to preclude it from becoming something that others could steal from him. Bizarre?

Actually, it's not such an unusual story and the United Nations even has a special committee negotiating a new international convention that addresses such appropriations of traditional culture and traditional knowledge, in music, in medicine, and in visual and verbal art.

Beginning with the paradoxical case of a traditional lullaby that acquired a composer late in its life and ‘fell into’ copyright, this talk grapples with representations of creative agency – such as authorship and tradition – that are endowed with the force of law through the copyright regime.

My motivation is to understand the dichotomies that shape understandings of creativity so that we will be better placed to undermine them, to liberate our imagination from their powerful hold, and to imagine creativity in alternative terms.

In a digital age, such acts of liberation and imagination are badly needed; creativity is still enclosed in categories from another era and bogged down by the weight of nineteenth-century romantic ideals about the author.

Since giving the Buchan Lecture in 2016, Valdimar has published two books and released a documentary film on subjects related to the lecture. Making Intangible Heritage: El Condor Pasa and Other Stories from UNESCO was published in 2018 by Indiana University Press, and Patrimonialities: Heritage vs. Property was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020, co-authored with Martin Skrydstrup. His documentary film, ""The Flight of the Condor: A Letter, a Song, and the Story of Intangible Cultural Heritage"", co-produced with filmmaker Áslaug Einarsdóttir, has been screened at numerous film festivals and conferences worldwide and is available in open access online. His next book, Copyrighting Tradition: Unknown Authors and the Voice of the Folk, is under contract with Indiana University Press."

The recording begins with a short presentation on the Elphinstone Institute's work by director, Dr Thomas McKean. This is followed by some introductory remarks by the then University of Aberdeen Principal, Professor Sir Ian Diamond.

The views expressed in these podcasts are those of the individuals concerned and do not represent the views of the University of Aberdeen.