Balancing the books: How folklore became part of an international agenda concerning intellectual property and cultural heritage

Abstract

Since the early 1960s, folklore has been on the agenda of two powerful international organizations: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Their overt intent has been to protect folklore from perceived abuses, but their work also had the aim of making the licensing of traditional arts an internationally marketable good. In this article I outline the premise for folklore’s entry on the agenda of international relations in the twentieth century and its fate since then. The article documents some of the efforts toward creating a global licensing scheme for folklore using intellectual property regulations. This proved to be problematic when it came to traditional culture. I identify two positions in this regard: on the one hand that the lack of protection for folklore constitutes a gap to be covered, and on the other that folklore is a bad fit for intellectual property.