Dear Editor,
At the risk of censure, I’ve pointed out that this administration can be and has been unnecessarily glacial on issues of cultural policy. That is something we need to correct because the failure to do so has repercussions for virtually every sector. That said, what we thankfully have not had over the past three years is the sort of retrogressive and inane rhetoric as that which emanated from former President Bharrat Jagdeo as captured in his comments on government’s decision to update Guyana’s copyright legislation after sixty years.
As both a former head of government and a man who had/has presidential aspirations still, Mr. Jagdeo has been no doubt aware of the critical importance of copyright in particular, and intellectual property in general, as a tool for development. What his pronouncements belie however is what I had reason to label years ago as the deliberately malign neglect of culture and creativity under the PPP era.
My research on the efforts to update copyright legislation indicates that for the fifteen years prior to its expulsion from government, the PPP effectively kicked the can along the road on copyright, beginning with a lip service commitment to include it as part of a national development strategy at the turn of the century, to a 2004 copyright bill that was drafted and put on the shelf, to empty promises by Ministers of Culture Gail Teixeira and Frank Anthony.
There are three core dimensions to Mr. Jagdeo’s recent pronouncements that indicate either his gross disingenuousness or woeful ignorance on this issue. The first is the inference that there can be some causal relationship between updated copyright legislation here and Guyana’s continued poverty. Copyright remains the critical cornerstone of the creative industries, the orange economy. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that trade in creative goods and services grew 134 percent between 2002 and 2011, reaching a total of US $646 billion in the latter year. This period coincides with Mr. Jagdeo’s tenure as president, one marked not by any progressive measure on creative arts development but by the evisceration of cultural institutions and the establishment of cardboard cutout ‘initiatives’ in their place. A visionary leader would have looked at the global economic trends and begun to redesign his country’s economic infrastructure to take advantage of a not only viable but vibrant pathway for economic diversification.
The second dimension has to do with his simplistic assertion that on the issue of copyright legislation enforcement, Guyana will have to essentially be the policeman for the world. Guyana acceded to the Berne Convention in 1994, the key international convention that obligates us to recognize and offer protections for copyright on a global scale, the same obligations that every signatory of the convention is bound to. Stemming from this global concept of copyright is a complex interplay of both multilateral and bilateral obligations to which we are bound and the breach of which has repercussions for our international standing as well as our own economic development. For example, under the US Carib-bean Basin Initiative, we are in danger of losing our beneficiary status as a country that “Allows the broadcast of copyrighted material, including films or television material belonging to United States copyright owners without their express consent.” The only time that there has been any indication that the PPP had anything close to a clearly articulated policy position against the enforcement of copyright was the embarrassing exhortation made by Mr. Jagdeo’s successor, Mr. Donald Ramotar, for the UN to review international copyright legislation in order to make textbooks more cheaply available to students from developing countries. This was of course in the wake of the scandal of the then government of Guyana tendering for pirated textbooks even as it was investing tens of millions of US dollars into a Marriott-branded hotel. The third dimension of course is Mr. Jagdeo’s claim that piracy is so intrinsic to the cultural and economic resilience of Guyanese that it would effectively constitute a national punishment if copyright legislation were to be updated and enforced. First of all, even if this were empirically true, it would in fact be an indictment of both the literal and metaphorical poverty of his own economic programmes. Mr. Jagdeo cannot have it both ways – he is either the architect of a resilient and transformed modern Guyana, or he’s the man under whose tenure a socio-economic infrastructure was constructed that is so fragile that it would collapse if people stopped bootlegging DVDs. The reality is that the cottage industry component of copyright piracy developed due to a failure to diversify including creating a legitimate structure for the core activities involved. With a functional National Film Commission, the pursuing and signing of coproduction treaties with international partners, packaging and distribution agreements with film companies (as has happened in other jurisdictions), we could have easily been the site of the creation of intellectual property as opposed to a site for its theft. The real winners of the copyright piracy environment cultivated under Jagdeo were never the poor that he is now supposedly concerned about – it was always those who had the financial capacity to import, process and distribute the basic materials for the pirated content. In fact, many of those people who have had to resort to selling DVDs on the street to make ends meet would likely have been better employed if Guyana’s wild west copyright environment were not a key deterrent for external investors, or if local investment were made in creative industry development.
Over the past three years, I’ve had meetings both locally and internationally with persons who are involved in copyright infrastructure development, either at the regional or national level. Almost unfailingly there is always an initial hesitance about the sincerity of my interest in bringing Guyana into the fold. Our partners in the region in particular had long stopped reaching out to the government of Guyana because every invitation extended to the Jagdeo/Ramotar administrations was rebuffed or ignored, and any forum that we were obligated to hold here was held under virtual secrecy. I cannot begin to calculate not merely the economic but reputational damage that Jagdeo’s position on copyright has done to this country and I’m disinterested in speculation upon his and his party’s motivation in doing so – all we can do now is to ensure that we move forward. Copyright reform, not merely legislation but general infrastructure, has to move forward, and has to be done as a component of meaningful mainstreaming of culture into national development, including specifically into the letter and spirit of the Green State Development Strategy. It is up to Mr. Jagdeo and the opposition he, for want of a better word, leads whether they want to catch up, but they should not be allowed to continue to hold us back.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
Advisor on Cultural Policy
Government of Guyana
