Arts festivals as cultural heritage in a copyright saturated world

Many of the activities that occur as part and parcel of arts festivals can be mapped onto existing categories of copyright works. Indeed, so powerful is the rhetoric of these categories that there is a question about the extent to which they have constituted the very idea of “arts” in this context – so that festivals typically identify themselves as film festivals, musical festivals, theatre festivals and so on, even if in fact empirical research reveals that almost no festivals confine themselves to only one form of “artistic” output (F Macmillan, “A Taxonomy of Arts Festivals: Mapping Issues in Cultural Property and Human Rights” (Working Paper 2, HERA “Cultivate Project”, 2013, http://www.cultivateproject.dk/)). It would, therefore, be tempting to treat festivals as being just like any other form of distribution of copyright protected works. Turan, for example, argues that film festivals, at least, are an alternative form of distribution for films that have failed to find the usual commercial outlets for distribution (K Turan, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), at 7-8). This observation might also hold good for musical festivals given that there are particular constraints on commercial distribution in both the film and music industries which, like all constraints, are likely to produce a drive for alternative means of fulfilling desire. However, limiting our understanding of festivals to being merely another means of distribution is really limiting our understanding of the nature of arts festivals and their social, political and economic significance. While it is undoubtedly true that arts festivals, particularly some arts festivals, produce economic value for the entertainment industries, they also encompass a range of other values that are less easily measured but nevertheless present. In this chapter it will be argued that arts festivals should be recognized as a form of cultural heritage. If this case can be made out, then it raises a problem. This is that the public and communal values of arts festivals as forms of cultural heritage appear to be in potential conflict with the intellectual property rights that saturate the arts festival environment.