ABSTRACT
The history of the 'discovery' of Aboriginal art is a story in which post Second World War anthropologists and missionaries recognised that the marketing of arts was a way of making money for settlements, and a means of asserting the value of Aboriginal culture. The first copyright case concerning Aboriginal art to go before the Australian courts was Yangarriny Wunungmurra v Peter Stripes Fabrics in 1981. According to Aboriginal people, the designs and motifs shown in their art belong to the community rather than the person who made it. Aboriginal people maintain that the protection of their works should include collective ownership, should allow the work to be maintained in perpetuity, and should protect their stories, not just particular expressions of them. The lack of a theoretical framework makes the case for the protection of Aboriginal arts weak in the sense that it is difficult to defend without appealing to an intuition, an intuition that, if not shared, cannot persuade.
