Indonesian Arts and the Making of Intellectual Property Law

FAIN: FT-55948-08

Lorraine V. Aragon
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)

This research project will examine how new and expanding intellectual property rights discourses are constructed moment by moment, but also can be refused when necessary in the service of protecting pre-existing ethics of social reciprocity and shared repertoires. My project concentrates on points of debate between earlier scholarship and discourse on "tangible" property commons, newer scholarship on the use of property law for "intangible" intellectual property domains, and recent ideas of a "global" commons. This book will introduce comparative evidence on the kind of vital intellectual commons that I have observed among Indonesian artists. Indonesian arts practitioners do not work in a perfect world without rivalry, market concerns, or competition for audiences, yet they implement a normative set of trans-generational sharing and attribution practices that have been sustainable over long periods.