Calibrating Copyright for Creators and Consumers: Promoting Distributive Justice and Ubuntu

Abstract

This chapter is part of an international collaborative book project led by Rebecca Giblin & Kimberlee Weatherall. The book will be published open access via ANU Press in 2016.The project's goal is to consider what copyright law that truly serves the public interest would look like if we started from a clean slate. After setting out our conception of the public interest, the book's chapters ask - if we were tasked with writing such a new law what would we do? Would we throw everything out and begin afresh or build on some existing fundamentals?

This chapter considers how such a reimagined copyright law might do a better job of creating the literature, particularly children’s literature, which is so sorely lacking in disadvantaged communities around the world. It does so by envisaging a copyright law that furthers the public interest by applying principles of distributive justice, and with reference to the African concept of ‘Ubuntu’.

Keywords: public interest, copyright, ubuntu, neglected languages, neglected markets

JEL Classification: K10, K30