Category: Intellectual Property

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

October 19, 2009 by jmukai

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.  read more »