Egypt's MPs are expected to pass a law requiring royalties be paid whenever copies are made of museum pieces or ancient monuments such as the pyramids.
Zahi Hawass, who chairs Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the BBC the law would apply in all countries.
The money was needed to maintain thousands of pharaonic sites, he said....
"Commercial use" of ancient monuments like the pyramids or the sphinx would also be controlled, he said. "Even if it is for private use, they must have permission from the Egyptian government," he added.
But he said the law would not stop local and international artists reproducing monuments as long as they were not exact replicas....
Thanks to Eric Kansa for the alert and for this comment:
...Egypt’s move to claim copyright over 4000-year old monuments obviously has nothing to do with motivating new creativity or invention, since the creators of these antiquities are long dead. (Note: neither does Walt Disney’s continually demand to exclusively own Mickey Mouse…) In our legal system, such works would belong to the public domain, and would be available to all for any purpose....
I wonder how the Egyptian state will try to enforce this far-reaching copyright claim. The Egyptomania genie is long out of the bottle (at least since the New Kingdom!). There are some 17,000 images tagged as “Giza” just in Flickr. Attempting to extract licensing rents on such uses will be monumental task, on par with building the pyramids in the first place....
How this law will impact research and education about Ancient Egypt is another issue of great concern. Making it harder to use images in journals and textbooks is no way to encourage understanding of the past....
Comment. I see the need for funds to protect Egyptian antiquities. But there's a category mistake in seeking those funds through the retroactive extension of copyright to objects that have already entered the public domain. I've called that piracy against the public domain, and I have to use that description here as well. The problem in Egypt is not that copying harms the original creators, or that those creators need an artificial monopoly, but that the cost of preserving those antiquities is not adequately borne by those who benefit from them. That kind of cost-spreading is normally done through taxes, and the real problem here is that Egypt cannot tax non-Egyptians. (I'm conceding that all of us benefit from the existence of Egyptian antiquities, a point that some might not concede.) The problem is hard and Egypt cannot solve it alone. But I'd rather see nations use local taxes to create a worldwide fund for objects of worldwide interest than to see nations use copyright law as a general vehicle for fund-raising. The policy principle at stake here is that the public domain should grow every year and never shrink.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/27/2007 01:43:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
