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Aboriginal culture to get greater protection

By Annabel Crabb

19 May 2003 - Aboriginal communities will be given extensive new rights over the artworks and stories of their members in legislation to be announced today by Communications Minister Richard Alston.

The new laws will create a kind of cultural copyright that allows communities to sue where their legends and stories are misused, distorted or exploited by purchasers, even if the artist is dead or unlocatable.

"What's unique about this is that communities are often custodians of the stories and they also are contributors to the work themselves," Senator Alston said yesterday.

Individual artists, writers and filmmakers already have "moral rights" to their work under legislation passed in 2000, which give them the right to have work properly identified and attributed, as well as protecting it against alteration or distortion.

But the new legislation, drafted as amendments to the Copyright Act, will create a class of collective rights for Aboriginal communities, enabling them to assume the moral rights on behalf of an artist.

The communities could pursue legal action - even if the artist was disinclined to do so - where artworks, stories and images were being used disrespectfully, changed or adapted for commercial purposes, or misidentified.

Senator Alston said works would be protected where communities had signed agreements with their constituent artists, and flexibility would be used in defining what constituted a "community" for the purposes of the legislation.

"It will cover those who are regarded as being able to speak on the community's behalf. It won't be just one person - it may be the chair of the community council or maybe a group of elders," Senator Alston said.

"A large part of this is the community stepping into the shoes of the artist, but it's also the communities themselves wanting to have confidence that they are in control of their own stories."

The decision, to be announced by Senator Alston with Attorney-General Daryl Williams and Indigenous Affairs Minister Philip Ruddock, comes after lobbying from indigenous artists' groups and Democrats arts spokesman Aden Ridgeway, who moved similar amendments unsuccessfully in the Senate last year.

He argued that "indigenous Australians are the custodians of knowledge and practices relating to the land that have been developed for countless generations".

Source: The Age

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