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Music as Law: “The Lion King,” Intellectual Property and South African Cultural Heritage -- Veit Erlmann

Event Start: 
Tue, 02/02/2010 - 5:30pm
Location: 
The Center for Ethnomusicology, 701C Dodge Hall

Tuesday, February 2 in 701C, Center for Ethnomusicology
Veit Erlmann
Music as Law: “The Lion King,” Intellectual Property and South African Cultural Heritage
Abstract:

In March 2006 a landmark settlement was reached between Walt Disney Inc. and the estate of Solomon Linda, the South African composer of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a song used (without approval from Linda’s estate) in the Disney movie and Broadway production “The Lion King.” Although it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in protecting authors’ rights in the developing world, the settlement raises numerous questions about the role intellectual property (IP) law is increasingly playing in global social, economic and political affairs.
In my talk I will make two interrelated arguments. First, I propose that musical practice shares with the law a fundamental concern with normativity. The way musicians, audiences and the music industry interact often seems more rule-like and self-referential than the model of law underpinning legal scholarship, having a profound impact on – and in a way even creating - many of law’s taken-for-granted concepts of authorship, originality, and appropriation. Consequently, such practices do not so much stand outside the law, as in the majority of studies on music and IP which frame the relationship between the music industry and the law as that of two distinct realms - as music and the law – than they are to be seen as law.
Second, I argue that in the South African context this approach is particularly useful because the attempts by the country’s formerly disenfranchised majority to reclaim its land, urban spaces, natural resources and, above all, cultural heritage are often couched in dichotomous terms; as part of a North-South conflict, a clash between the periphery and the center or an episode in a larger anti-imperialist struggle. As a consequence, such attempts risk obscuring the complex and contradictory landscape of musical and cultural practice in which author-centered visions of intellectual property are far from being universally accepted. Furthermore, liberally-inspired legal projects such as Linda vs. Disney not only fail to adequately reflect the implication of musical practices in the creation of power structures, they are themselves deeply complicit with a highly contested narrative about national heritage.

VEIT ERLMANN teaches at the University of Texas at Austin where he is the holder of the Endowed Chair in Music History. Born in Germany, he studied musicology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy in Berlin and Cologne. He has done fieldwork in several African countries such as Cameroon, Niger, Ghana, South Africa, Lesotho and Indonesia. Among his most recent publications are Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination. South Africa and the West (New York, 1999) (which won the Alan P.Merriam Prize in 2000) and Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality, forthcoming from Zone Books, New York.

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