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The Ironies of Intellectual Property
by Raj
Thursday, Sep. 16, 2004 at 7:18 PM
Opinions on yesterday's decision by the University of KwaZulu-Natal to prevent a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11.
Last night, activists from the University of KwaZulu-Natal
branch of the Treatment Action Campaign had planned a screening of Fahrenheit
9/11 here at the UKZN Centre for Civil Society. And then word got to the
distributors. And they called their lawyers. And their lawyers called here. The
University called their own lawyers, received a fax from a rather high-powered
boutique law firm, and realised that they might have the smack laid down on
them pretty heavily by United International Pictures, locally fronted by Videovision
Entertainment . So, with 15 minutes to go before the screening, the university signed
a statement promising not to show the film.
That this has happened at a Treatment Action Campaign
meeting is ripe with irony. TAC is the group that imported generic retrovirals
illegally into South Africa because the pharmaceutical industry had used intellectual
property laws to prevent the majority of people accessing the drugs. (Read more
about it here.) Another
irony – these laws are justified because, in the long run, we are told the poor
will benefit from innovation that couldn’t possibly happen without these laws. And
now the same intellectual property laws are being used to prevent a group of
activists from seeing a movie that tells uncomfortably true stories about the
US war on Iraq. The laws of property don’t much like dissent.
Staunch defenders of intellectual property might lay down
this challenge: the people at Videovision bought the rights for the film, hell,
they’re even releasing it next week. Why not just pay for a legal copy, give
the film makers their dime’s worth, let everyone see it in a nice mall, good
sound, decent seats, popcorn, and everyone go out for a beer afterward and talk
about it?
The replies are many and varied.
Moore doesn’t want the cash – he’s said that he’s happy
for people to download and share the film as long as they don’t sell it.
(More here.) The argument
for intellectual property rests on a claim that innovation will be spurred
by allowing innovators to reap windfall profits from their intellectual
property. Given that this particular innovator has declared an interest in
allowing the film to be screened free of charge, the theoretical argument
for intellectual in this case sort of falls away.
Even if Moore isn’t really the person who *should* benefit
from intellectual property law, if Moore is screwing decent hardworking
film distributors out of their cash, the arguments for intellectual
property just don’t hold in developing countries (more, courtesy of the
British government, here). There’s a
balance between what a society receives as ‘innovation’, and what it is
able to pay for it. The R25 that the malls will wring in exchange for a
chance to see the film is robbery, especially when fifty per cent of the
country lives below the poverty line, and that means a household (not
individual but family) income of less that R800 a month. Spare change for
the movies? I don’t think so.
And that’s if you ever thought that intellectual property
was a good idea in the first place, especially when it’s being used in
support of not-for-profit activities, by community groups, creatively.
More here.
But perhaps you’re the owner of Videovision Entertainment.
In which case, unconscionable activities won’t be new to you, Anant Singh.
Firstly, you’ll making a pack of money from commodifying the suffering of the
poorest people on this continent – rural black women - and selling it to
Europeans and North Americans as an authentic voice from the wilderness (for
example, here).
Yesterday, the first Zulu-language feature film, is a bitter triumph.
Originally written in English and, I have it on the authority of a fluent
Zulu-speaking TAC member, translated into preposterous and wildly unrealistic
Zulu, the film misrepresents the victimhood of poor rural women in KwaZulu-Natal.
Plaudits have been showered on this pretty and poignant film, but are the women
whose images validate Singh’s critics’ award going to be able to see the movie?
Precisely.
Stealing stories from the poors, imagined and real, and then
charging them to see themselves misrepresented? That’d be about the sum of a
film industry responsible for the privatisation of culture. Of course, you
can’t manage all this without help from your friends – lawyers, mall-owners,
universities, and the nice people in government who enforce the laws, and
subsidise your expropriation. For instance, taxpayers have been padding out a
new home for Anant Singh’s enterprises right here in KwaZulu-Natal. The old army
base on the waterfront is going to be handed over to Videovision at below
market price, so that a new movie studio can be built. And what more can we
expect of this studio than to churn out wild new AfroDisney flicks,
preposterous costumed dramas that will invariably be validated by the palettes
of European critics, not by the people of South Africa (more here.)
So it’s time for a little
creative action. As one audience member noted yesterday, screening the film
might be illegal, but it’s not wrong. South Africa has plenty of experience
with legal but wrong phenomena, and it was a scene being replayed elsewhere in
the country. A rescripted Carling Black Label logo, retaining the look but
substituting the words “Black Labour, White Guilt" for “Carling Black
Label” was ruled illegal yesterday by the Supreme court here. When capital
holds hostage to parody, tries to prevent us from laughing at it and ourselves,
and prevents the freedom of expression, it’s time to fight back.
Which is why plans are afoot to screen Fahrenheit 9/11 at a
venue off campus, with free entry, in a neighbourhood where residents can’t afford
to go see it in the malls. Of course, even if poor South Africans could afford
to go see this one movie, it’s unlikely that they’d be let through the very
discriminating doors of South Africa’s mall wonderlands. The private spaces in South
Africa’s new autonomous zones of capital are very well bordered. And that’s
why it’s incumbent on those who can get into these spaces to subvert them –
graffiti, theatre, public politics need to be brought back into these
privatised enclaves. Indeed, the Anti-War coalition already projected the film
onto the US embassy in Johannesburg, and it has been screened all over the shop
in South Africa.
The intellectual property goons brought their fight to a packed lecture room at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. They oughtn’t to be surprised if the fight is brought back to them, in the plush malls and offices from which they fax their edicts. And, after the biggest strike in South African history, they ought not to underestimate how pissed off, and belligerent, a very large slab of the population at being scalped by these puny people. That’d be the ultimate irony.
For more information, contact
AIDS ACTION: Fazel Khan 0845778627, Mandisa Mbali 0828718517 or Richard Pithouse 0837929009
THE PALESTINE SUPPORT COMMITTEE: Lubna Nadvi 0837864918 or Rasool Snyman 0835432480
ETHEKWENI SOCIAL FORUM: Roy Chetty 0845891913 or Basil Palan 0822593320
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