Dear Editor,
The only honest message of the opposition leader’s assault on the inevitable copyright bill lies in expressing his party’s long opposition and contempt towards addressing the livelihood of Guyanese creative talents.
We are 50 years behind the rest of our continental and Caribbean neighbours in this respect. No! Copyright will not close down small businesses, it will reform and enhance their performance. Where this will hurt Mr Jagdeo is that there are sudden TV and radio station owners and executives that he has created that exist on the pretext of a status quo of piracy. I am not a champion of first world interests, but the local copyright bill will force into being meaningful ‘Local Creative Content’ in all electronic media, rather than possessing extreme volumes of peculiarly acquired assets. We must develop Trademarks in craft, jewellery, visual arts, IT and industrial arts, and these talents must be protected by law, a large amount of our young population are semi-literate due to the collapse of the education system under the PPP, mainly to the ‘No child left behind system, without the industrial arts back-up application, and the ‘Troubled Times’ but they have talents, rather than have hundreds of youth walking and selling rip-off DVDs and CDs, or their talents praised as inmates of our prison system, let’s provide a chance for them to grow. It is obvious that neither Mr Jagdeo nor the PPP understand that Guyana cannot remain isolated for another forty years. Possibly the PPP thinks that they can best survive as visionless politicians in a nation of backward sycophants, but that criminalised, retarding process has gone too far already. Not one of the current opinion makers has ever reflected on the state of the nation’s talents, they fret rightfully so over local content in oil, and their content in politics, but never a word on the existence of the local creative content they neither understand, are concern-ed about or want to be informed about.
This President has provided hope for the struggle for copyright that has been going on for decades. Dr Abiola Inniss last Thursday 25th, October reiterated the sane process towards the ‘Developing a Strategic Intellectual property plan for Guyana’ but most of my media friends were not there. We all know that the President’s objective will require a process, which Dr. Inniss and all of us in cultural industries do understand so with or without the willingness of the opposition to be educated, it needs to begin now.
Yours faithfully,
Barrington Braithwaite
