ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews practice relating to intellectual property and the global music industry. It discusses international copyright laws as they have been applied to music, the reaction to current practices on the part of many nation states in Africa, UNESCO, and WIPO, and the implications of this for an anthropological understanding of property. The expansion of market capitalism into the realm of “intangible property” is clearly found in music, where publishing companies established control of musical ideas in the eighteenth century and have attempted to keep those ideas from returning to the public domain ever since. The terms of music copyright were similar to those of other printed creations. The digitization of music and the new ways of distributing it are once again changing the industry – and also the ideas about who owns what in music. The music industry is a very technology-sensitive industry, and has been since the invention of the earliest printed music.
