WE NEED LAWS AND CHECKS AND BALANCES FOR NEW STREAMS OF CREATIVE BUSINESSES

GUYANA is behind the rest of CARICOM concerning engaging and streaming the needs of creative businesses. What do I mean by creative businesses? It’s definitely not only the Arts. Creative businesses apply to any commercial endeavour that is developing a process not used before, but in its activity enhances the discipline it is developed within. Some years ago, a former university student in engineering related a story to me about a project he was working on; he fell ill and was incapacitated. On recovering, he discovered that the friendly lecturer he was sharing his idea with had left the job and had migrated with his files and notes.

Today, the auto industry sports a useful innovative radar system, that very well might have had had its genesis on these shores. I am told that on entering university, a student signs an agreement that whatever the student works on at the University belongs to the university. Fair enough, but what applies in the sudden, apparent commercialisation of that research beyond the university. Which can be traced back to not-so-prudent actions from within the institution; do those complex mechanisms and laws required to decipher intentional wrongdoing and render justice exist?
In the area of the Arts, fabric design, architecture, literature, software design, graphic arts, novels, comic books, movie and animation storyboards and their prolific imagery are all linked. Most ideas may emerge from a single mind that has processed heaps of information and assembled it into a moving concept, at times over decades. But to bring it to the commercial market requires skilled technical workers who will have access to volumes of other people’s exclusive, priceless creative concepts. What industrial laws exist to deter an opportunistic employee from downloading this or that on a flash drive and pirating its content to eager businesses, confident of loose laws, and negligible penalties.

There is a strong parasitic political and commercial lobby against the streaming of Intellectual Property Rights in Guyana. Their secret concern and peeve is the erroneous belief that there is a preponderance of one ethnic group in the Arts, thus copyright “gon empowah dem people.” While with others who are promoters who see talents to be kept as low-valued investment, with their personal high-profit results, view the legal empowerment of talents that will require tax and performance contracts, possibly using the Jamaican template for music performers, with an advance on signing of contract and the remaining amount backstage before the act takes the stage, leaving no room for after-show excuses, promises and deceptions.

Talent must be that part of the budget that is addressed with priority. Why must our sleepy, archaic and useless laws on intellectual property be updated? Simply because the labour world we live in is a swiftly changing world, and because people live day to day, thus procrastination and sloth adjustments should not be where we find ourselves, as was done with the EU sugar subvention, towards the inevitable economic collapse of the sugar industry in this country. The sugar contraction and decline provide a capable ‘case study’ in after-the-fact response, for example; In the Stabroek News, October 2, 2010, then President Jagdeo mentioned in dismay that-“ If [the] Skeldon factory doesn’t work sugar is dead.” There were no joint letters demanding favourable preparations for the sugar workers. But in 2018 after the collapse had come, to my surprise, there was Kwayana, ‘not in my name,’ the late Andaiye, and Moses Bhagwan castigating government, January 9, 2018, on the inevitable retrenchment of the sugar workers, in the 24th hour, taking high ground where there was no substance for high ground.

But this kind of too-late-blame cry will happen again if we cannot morph into a proactive mode. Let’s take a look at the largest real economy in the world, North America, the US of A, where about half of our nation has taken up residence over the past 60 years. American statistics state that over the past decade home-owned businesses without employees have maintained 60.1% of the American economy. Some years ago, ToysRus closed their physical store doors, to online shopping. Currently 2020, in what America is calling the “Retail Apocalypse,” Macy’s after over 100 years is closing 125 stores in the next three years, at a human high-end job value of some 2,000 corporate positions. Altogether 2,200 stores will be closing, from top-end retailers like Walgreens, Sears, Forever 21, Pier 1 imports, Earth Fare, among others.

These stores provided employment for thousands of sales service and blue-collar jobs, many of them immigrants, many Guyanese among them; this will reflect in fewer remittances back here. Then there is the dark shadows crime business hope that many Guyanese refer to naively as “ De Government should leh de drugs pass.” For those who think that sending narcotics to the ‘Big City’ is still a lucrative open-market option, selfishly they ignore the body count of those days and social degradation. Well, it’s idiotic to expect continuity of that kind of illegality, against countries with advanced technologies that have been on a war footing for over 100 years. The deals their friends who are in their custody made, no doubt have listed all who are involved, including you, are linked and also the potential next tier. Perish the illusionary cartel dreams of boys with drug money and designer clothes, magically escaping poverty, tough on locals, bribing here and there but soft when faced with real toughness. I’m talking extradition-Rikers-Island, isolation toughness. No country, on the other hand, can without systems for practical self-development provide continuous monthly salaries based on citizenship, because it has an oil income. That’s the ultimate extreme of ‘hand-to-mouth thinking.’ It has never been done.

We have the creative talents in every area, but not the A administrative bureaucratic, and B legal support. The A & B have to be addressed, and the conversation must begin, for much has not been said. Beyond the elections the potential and practical reasons to keep our creative people here and to activate their talents in the national interest, rest primarily in the court of the APNU+AFC Coalition and specific commercial groups, to seriously commence core discourses to address the serious nature of this article and explore the impending consequences of not being pro-active for Guyana, in the new world image and identity and its cultural economics.

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