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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired. Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.
(Mark Twain, 1903)Introduction
The field of intellectual property covers copyright, patents and trademarks. Of these it is copyright that has the most relevance for cultural policy. Copyright exists to protect creators of original artistic work from unauthorised use of their creations. It does not cover ideas, but rather the form in which those ideas are expressed or ‘fixed’. The ideas may be expressed in literary, artistic, dramatic or musical form, as well as in the form of films, videos, sound recordings, television broadcasts, and so on. Protection is provided by means of the legal system, and intellectual property law, of which copyright law is a part, has grown to become a major branch of legal theory and practice.
In order to understand the implications of copyright for cultural policy, it is necessary to comprehend the economic rationale for the provision of protection and the basic economics of copyright administration. In the first sections of this chapter we consider these issues, with particular reference to the use of creators' collecting societies as a means for securing and distributing copyright revenues.
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