According to Carrol (2000), intellectual property rights, such as copyright, are perceived in the Middle East as an invention from “the West” that is being forced upon the rest of the world. Although intellectual property rights of local works are generally respected, and copying is considered immoral, movies and music are copied and redistributed without much restriction. Carrol (2000) explains this by talking about the local connection between people that contributes to a respect for each other’s work. Western works are produced and redistributed mostly without any personal relationships between producer, distributor, and consumer, which makes copying seem like less of a violation. You don’t steal from your neighbor, but do you really care about someone from the other side of the world?
It has been over 15 years since Carrol’s article was published and we are now more connected than ever through the internet. While the anti-piracy movement is becoming stronger we are also becoming more open about sharing intellectual property with others. Creative Commons was founded in 2001 and lets you give up your copyright and allow for your work to be shared and used by others. In this post I introduce and discuss some experiences with copyright and open resources in the Middle East.
My friend and academic from Palestine, Ahmad, explained that you usually give up your copyright when you are working for a university or research institute there, meaning that anything you produce belongs to your employer. This means that you do not have the option to place it under a creative commons license. Ahmad told me that he has shared his presentations anyway, but that there are no good platforms. In general, people are aware that there are copyright laws concerning intellectual property, but the laws are not enforced. Therefore, copyright laws are often not respected and plagiarism is a common problem. Ahmad told me about an experience when his already published paper was plagiarized by another university teacher, without any reference to the original work.
My own experiences, when doing field work in the Middle East, show a reluctance towards sharing data and intellectual property. When I first came to Iraqi Kurdistan and was looking for geographical data to use for visualization, data collection, and analysis, I was met with a “yes we will help you find data” followed by a “no, you can’t have any soft copies, only hard copies”, i.e. no data files, only paper maps. The reason for not sharing data was reportedly security, and I was told that even if I go to Erbil (the administrative capital) and meet with government officials, they will not give me access to any digital data. At the directorate of meteorology (where I bought meteorological data) I remember an irritated lady saying “Why should we share our data with academics? They just come here and take data but they never give anything back”. I later got access to the geographical data by contacting the United Nations organizations active in the region, who willingly shared everything with me.
Creative Commons is not a well known concept in the Middle East, but there are initiatives to spread awareness of Creative Commons in the Arab world. In 2011 the 3rd Creative Commons Arab Regional Meeting and Concert was held in Tunisia, with the following goals:
“Raise awareness of open licensing and open source tools as ways to promote self expression, creativity, innovation and peer-production in an open and collaborative environment
Connect local individuals (bloggers, artists, activists, etc) and institutions (universities, schools, law professionals, cultural centers, etc) that share an interest in open licensing and open source with the broader Arab regional Creative Commons and open source community
Train these individuals and institutions to the actual use of open licensing and open source tools for creative works, self expression and business development
Create a work environment which is oriented to sharing knowledge and products
Foster original content production in Arabic which responds to countrys’ local needs
Enhance creative production in the Arab world and distribution in an open but legal way.”
This mindset of data being best kept “behind a locked door” is a huge hindrance to research and teaching in the Middle East, and surely in other parts of the world as well. More awareness need to be spread about the benefits of openness and sharing, and here universities play a potentially important role.
References Carroll, J. (2000). Intellectual property rights in the Middle East: A cultural perspective. Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. LJ, 11, 555.