Due to the fact that the United Nations doesn’t have anything more important to deal with, delegates from 189 countries, including the United States and Canada, are lobbying in Geneva for the organization to institute laws to make cultural appropriation illegal – and for those laws to be implemented quickly.
The delegates are a part of a specialized international committee in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) which was founded in 2001 to expand intellectual property regulations to protect indigenous art, forms of expression like dance, and even words.
According to CBC, James Anaya, dean of law at the University of Colorado, said that the United Nations document should “obligate states to create effective criminal and civil enforcement procedures to recognize and prevent non-consensual taking and illegitimate possession, sale and export of traditional cultural expressions.”
Not only could the state put you in jail for cultural appropriation, those who feel as though their culture is appropriated would be able to sue you for damages. In other words, you could go to jail for making and selling burritos if you’re not Mexican, or wearing a kimono while white.
There has never been a human culture that has not “appropriated” from other cultures except for those so isolated that they never encounter other cultures. Appropriation is literally older than civilization, and no action of WIPO is going to change that. It may, however, provide even more ways for emotional and legal blackmail to be made profitable, and give even more tools to those who long to force others to bend to their will.
Ed Krayewski has more at the Hit and Run blog:
What sort of appropriation does the committee want to stop? University of Colorado Law Dean James Anaya, an indigenous leader and a technical analyst for the IGC, points to products that purport to be made or endorsed by indigenous groups but aren’t. At the Geneva meeting, Anaya offered Urban Outfitters’ “Navajo line” as an example. The Navajo Nation actually brought suit in U.S. court against Urban Outfitters over that line of products in 2012, and the case was settled out of court last year. It’s unclear how an international intellectual property bureaucracy would improve the situation.
But it’s clear how it could create new avenues for rent-seeking. The World Intellectual Property Organization generates revenue from fees, such as the ones it charges for international trademarks. Any system the IGC creates is likely to include a similar international mechanism for registering whichever “traditional cultural expressions” get protections. Such a setup could have a chilling effect on any commercialization of folklore, even by members of the original indigenous communities.
After all, the same forces of globalization and decentralization that have made intellectual property laws more difficult to enforce offer the potential to drastically expand native producers’ reach. KPMG has noted, for example, that the internet offers a “new potential for indigenous Australians in regional and remote areas to access global audiences.” An IGC-style intellectual property regime would inevitably require such entrepreneurs, not just the big corporations accused of cultural appropriation, to get additional approvals for their activity.
Meanwhile, the same governments with long histories of abusing indigenous populations would be responsible for deciding who belongs to such populations and who faces criminal penalties for not meeting the governments’ definitions. Kathy Bowrey, a law professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, tells Reason that she would love to see the IGC succeed in setting up an system that genuinely protects indigenous culture. But she has no hopes that it will. Given the “racist practices that mark everyday lives of First Nations people domestically,” she says, “I’m not sure why there is an expectation that these states would operate differently on the international stage.”
