(Extract of an interview with Barrington Braithwaite in Georgetown, Guyana in 2002. Braithwaite is a well-known illustrator, graphic artist, playwright and author of many publications. He has also won at least two copyright cases.)

* Petamber Persaud (PP): What is the function of copyright in the local creative field?
* Barrington Braithwaite (BB): Copyright is to empower the intellectual property of the writer or artist. The presence of copyright in a society opens the door for your creative talents, for the expertise in that area to rise above the usual struggle you’re in, to create a new industry to enable you to earn and have the respect of the community. As it applies to Guyana, the term ‘copyright and intellectual property’ is strange to the people who deal with the writer and the artist and it is strange to people who the writer and artist have to deal with. It is an ongoing battle to get them to respect your intellectual property, to get them in the first place even to deal with the subject because there is a certain mind block to local creativity; it has to be endorsed by someone else before they recognise it. That is like a colonial element still present sort of impeding on copyright. There is also a commercial element because many of our merchants commit copyright infringements on a daily basis by importing a lot of junk. There is a fear that if copyright becomes active it will affect them. So they prefer to keep us, the creative people, the writer and the artist in a permanent bondage so they could go on existing. But again there is limited copyright coverage in this country and that coverage is there only because we are part of the Commonwealth Copyright Act [1968]. On two occasions, I had to put up cases to protect myself and I won both – two out of two!
* PP: Let’s look at how copyright could benefit the creative people.
* BB: It seems like Guyana is the only country not doing anything. But signing a copyright act is only part of the issue. Enforcement is the bigger issue – there ought to be training.
* PP: Before you go on; let us recap. We need copyright, we need legislation, we need enforcement, and we need training. What training you’re talking about?
* BB: You have to train people – the custom, the police and other personnel to look into copyright.
* PP: Why?
* BB: Because copyright seems to be a non-existent word. In a lot of official areas, people don’t understand what it is, what are you talking about…
* PP: It seems then we would need a whole industry to tackle this issue.
* BB: You would need effective people and serious participation by whoever is in authority. What we are having is a system that tells artists, writers and so on to get out of Guyana; go, go, go – we don’t need you.
* PP: Example…
* BB: Every year the calypsonians complain – every year they do a song and in a blink of an eye it is pirated and mixed with other things and selling all over Georgetown. Now the artistes don’t make any money and less than two weeks after Mashramani, they have to go back to earning a living, sometimes taking menial jobs, sometimes a guard service job to feed themselves because there is no impetus to motivate them to plunge into music, and stay in music, to study and understudy, and write so long before the next competition comes around, they may have two/three more hits out on the market…
* PP: They must have the time and space to produce and also earn.
* BB: Yes. The same thing with artists and theatre people. I write a play or you write a book and want to transform it into a play – when I had the ‘Jaguar’, there was a big quarrel over filming it because people were filming plays and putting them on cheap DVDs and selling them in West Indian areas like Brooklyn and all over the world and the actors were getting nothing, the writers were getting nothing…
* PP: It’s criminal.
* BB: Yes, it’s criminal and they could do this get away with it because you don’t have anyone who is listening and can make a difference by preparing the market place so that every television channel could have a potential small local play running, some small local drama running so that the creative people could earn while they work.
* PP: No market, no protection…
* BB: And there are people who know better who are benefiting from all this confusion and complexity because if they want to make an ad, they would use Shaggy or Dr Dre music. Now with copyright, you can’t do that; you may have to take some local musician and pay them serious money. However, having said all that, you may take that same money and pay some guy [gal] in Trinidad. For example, the guy who writes for ‘Square One’ the Barbadian group that is tearing up the charts is a Guyanese – he had to go to live in Barbados to be successful; he couldn’t do it and make money here. So what you have, in this country, as I said before, is that the creative people are been kept in a sort of prison and what we need as creative people is face this and do whatever is necessary to bring change, we got to make this discussion part of parliament.
* PP: Now where do we go from here. The prospects facing the writer, the scriptwriter, the playwright, the poet, the artist, the artiste is dim without the enactment and enforcement of copyright and intellectual property.
(Look out for a more recent discussion on the subject.)
Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com
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by Petamber Persaud