Dance like a book: Copyright and the Conundrums of Culture

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> SEMINAR SERIES <strong>Lawrence Liang</strong> Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore on <strong>Dance like a book: Copyright and the Conundrums of Culture</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Copyright is not merely a theory of intangible property it is also a theory of culture and creativity. There is however an ontological puzzle underlying copyright's claims to culture. Copyright emerged within the history of a specific technology, paper and its ideas of originality, authorship and expression are rooted within a literary tradition, so what happens when copyright encounters art, music, cinema and dance? These cultural forms constitute the Bermuda triangle of copyright law where many of its foundational principles (originality, fixation, idea-expression divide) are either simply absent or inapplicable. If copyright is not particularly suited to address diverse cultural forms, then how may we imagine a legal system for the ownership and /or sharing of knowledge which emerges not from copyright but from the immanent logic of cultural forms? <strong>Tuesday, 27 January 2015</strong> <strong>About the speaker: </strong>Lawrence Liang is a researcher and writer at the Alternative Law Forum. One of the co-founders of ALF, Liang's areas of interests have been in law and culture, politics of copyright and law and literature. His doctoral research at the School of Arts and Aesthetics (JNU) on the cinematic courts of justice addresses law, philosophy and justice in Hindi cinema. He graduated from the National Law School, Bangalore and did his Masters at the University of Warwick. A keen follower of the open source movement in software, Liang has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain.