Leader of the Opposition Bharrat Jagdeo does not think that Guyana is ready for updated copyright legislation and has signaled his People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) will not support government’s move to update the laws.
“We are a poor developing country. Wait until such time in the future when people can afford to pay for the copyrighted stuff. That is how I see it. It may not sound like the most enlightened position given that you have international treaties and stuff but half of those treaties don’t protect us small countries. They don’t protect our interests,” he told a press conference he hosted yesterday at his office in Queenstown, Georgetown.
Jagdeo noted that President David Granger in his address to the Parliament last week mentioned that government will be moving to update Guyana’s intellectual property rights legislation. “I hope that people understand what this government is doing and what impact it would have on people,” he said.
When government passes this legislation next year, he said, “Every video store in this country will have to close that sells these bootlegs.”
He continued, “Every store that sells music now is going to have to, the way they currently do it, would have to shut those down. The guys who are doing the push cart, they can be charged too. They won’t be able to do that anymore.”
According to Jagdeo, citizens will have to pay for everything. “Every single thing. It means all the television shows that we broadcast now, we will have to pay for it.”
He claimed that the passage of copyright legislation may help “a couple of the people who we gather are in bed with them to work on this because then they would hog the entire cable environment and then they would charge people large sums of money.”
Asked about copyright legislation to protect the works of local artistes and other intellectual properties, Jagdeo said, “We were working on a model where we could protect… it might sound a bit pedantic. Let me say right at the beginning. I am not totally free trade oriented but where we protect locally produced material. I don’t see any compelling need. In many parts of the world, people don’t protect our people, our material.”
Nevertheless, copyrighted material for local artistes should be protected by law, he said. “We have those enforced and removed from the shelves etcetera and then wait for the appropriate time,” he added. “Trust me, the PPP will not be the one to take away anybody’s videos, movies that they could rent at this time, not when they are so poor.”
He agreed with the United States President Donald Trump’s philosophy of ‘Making America Great Again’ and protecting what is American as relevant to the Guyana situation. “We don’t have to be the policeman for the globe,” he said.