Technology, Intellectual Property Law and Culture The Tangification of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Focusing on cultural expressions that are most likely to intermingle with copyright law, trademark and IP-adjacent regulations, this book examines contemporary issues in technology, intellectual property law, and culture.

Intangible Cultural Heritage can consist of traditional knowledge, songs, craftsmanship, dance, and other practices, as well as the associated cultural artefacts and spaces; a widely varied global living heritage, transmitted generationally, must be allowed to organically evolve, often defying the process of identification so desirable in the realm of legal protections. This nebulous essence is particularly ill-suited to modern legal frameworks that can conflate the creative outputs that copyright is meant to protect with shared cultural practices. Combining a legal perspective with historical tact, the book develops a theoretical model to track the interaction amongst these issues as well as to make policy recommendations based on the existing and projected possible future outcomes. Several chapters of the book will be dedicated to contemporary issues where this framework and interaction are currently developing, focussing on law and technology issues with archiving and museums, online platforms and copyright infringement, and communities and creative production in virtual worlds.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of copyright law and intellectual property law.

1. Introduction

2. The Law

3. Theoretical Framework (Tangification)

4. Cultural Adoption and Tangification: The Process of Intangible Cultural Heritage Becoming Intellectual Property

5. Historical Cultural Expressions: Tangification and Legal Development

6. Contemporary Cultural Guardians: Archives, Museums, and Digitisation

7. Future Evolution: Virtual Worlds, User Communities, and Creative Contributions

8. Conclusion and Recommendations

Megan Rae Blakely is a lecturer at Lancaster University Law School. Her research interests are in intellectual property law, intangible cultural heritage, and digitisation, through an interdisciplinary lens. Her current research involves copyright and culture in virtual worlds. She serves as the Director for the Centre for Law and Society at Lancaster University and on the Executive Committee for the British and Irish Law, Education, and Technology Association. Dr. Blakely earned her LLM at SOAS, JD at University of California Law, San Francisco, and PhD at University of Glasgow School of Law.