Law versus lore: Copyright and conflicting claims about culture and property in Indonesia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate )

The spread of intellectual and cultural property laws and language to developing nations highlights tensions between individual and collective rights models. The Indonesian government's response was to redraw and meld the two types of law. Most Indonesian ‘traditional’ artists, however, reject the property assumptions of both legal regimes. This article portrays how the world's fourth most populous nation, Indonesia, reacted to multinational corporate and World Trade Organization pressures for stricter intellectual property laws with an unusual 2002 copyright law. The law combines standard copyright provisions that suit the West with atypical cultural property provisions that proclaim the government's copyright of all its citizens' ‘folklore and cultural products’. Like Indonesia's eminent domain land law, it potentially encloses the local resources of its ‘disorderly’ citizens for state‐imposed commercial development. Ethnographic narratives from regional artists show their alternative views on authority and transmission of local production knowledge, here termed ‘lore’. These artists’ collaborative creations are not deemed private property, most creators do not claim authorship, and copying is not generally an ethical problem. The example of a Flores weaving motif that political leaders sought to ‘copyright’ for their new district elucidates the gap between the aspirations of nation and region, law and lore. The discussion analyzes the provincialism and instability of universalist intellectual and cultural property models as it describes alternative authority processes and ethics used in a limited commons beyond the wired West.