Intellectual and Cultural Property

This book focuses on the fraught relationship between cultural heritage and intellectual property, in their common concern with the creative arts.

The competing discourses in international legal instruments around copyright and intangible cultural heritage are the most obvious manifestation of this troubled encounter. However, this characterization of the relationship between intellectual and cultural property is in itself problematic, not least because it reflects a fossilized concept of heritage, divided between things that are fixed and moveable, tangible and intangible. Instead the book maintains that heritage should be conceived as part of a dynamic and mutually constitutive process of community formation. It argues, therefore, for a critically important distinction between the fundamentally different concepts of not only intellectual and cultural heritage/property, but also of the market and the community. For while copyright as a private property right locates a