Consultations on the draft copyright legislation are not likely to be completed before this year’s Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA), Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport Dr Frank Anthony said.
Speaking with Stabroek News after a press conference at the NCN studios yesterday, Anthony said the issue was a complex one and consultations with various stakeholders were ongoing.
He said the issue could be approached in two ways, either by making incremental changes to existing legislation or more comprehensive changes and because of the many implications of such laws, discussions were still ongoing.
Stating that his ministry does not have overall responsibility for the matter, the minister declined to state a time frame for when the consultations could be expected to be completed. Asked whether it would be done before Carifesta, he said that he did not think this was likely.
It has been years since modern copyright legislation was promised to have been enacted by the government and there have been concerns raised about the lack of this.
In a letter to this newspaper in October last year, singer Rudy Grant had said that artistes should boycott Mashramani and Carifesta unless copyright laws are enforced.
And responding to a question from PNC Member of Parliament, Aubrey Norton in the National Assembly last July, Anthony had said his ministry was engaged in discussions with other ministries on copyright legislation.
Norton had asked him when the government planned to have such legislation to promote and protect the intellectual property of local artistes.
The minister had said he was assured that once the consultations were completed and a revision was done, the legislation would be tabled in Parliament.
Guyana, upon gaining independence, adopted British law on copyright, the Copyright Act, 1956 (UK). According to the Guyana Office for Investment website, the Act prevents the unlawful copying of physical material existing in the field of literature and the arts. Its object is to protect the writer and artist from the unlawful reproduction of his/her material.
“The Copyright Act is concerned only with the copying of physical material and not with the reproduction of ideas and it does not give a monopoly to any particular form of words or design,” the website stated.
Guyana is a signatory to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and is also a member of the World Intellectual Property Organi-zation (WIPO).
