Why Minority Artists Need to Understand Intellectual Property

American jazz musician and composer Miles Davis (1926 - 1991) playing the trumpet. (Photo by Express Newspapers/Getty Images)

I’ve mentioned the often overlooked and negative relationship between copyright and racial minorities before, specifically by those that exploit minority artists and those that profess a “free culture” movement. This weekend I ran into this gem.

According to The Root‘s Latoya Peterson, “[a]ll too often, when it comes to intellectual property, black artists are the ones who lose the rights to their work.”

Peterson quotes Lateef Mtima, founder and director of the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice at the Howard University School of Law,  “It’s not hard to get our community excited about music, art or fashion — we need to get out there in the communities to protect that work.”

To help educate minority artists, Mtima is “partnering with the NAACP and Google to take intellectual property discussions out of legal journals, courtrooms and academia and to bring them to artists, scientists, technologists and creators of all stripes. He hopes to get more people, particularly young black entrepreneurs, interested in protecting themselves, and their work.”

Paterson’s conclusion is on point,

If black creators don’t own the rights to their work, we lose out economically and culturally. Intellectual property matters. And the creative future of a generation of young black artists depends on us learning how to leverage the law to our advantage.

One factor readers may want to consider when reading pro “free culture” ideology, is to note who professes the “free culture” ideology and whether or not they address the issues mentioned above. More likely than not, they never do.

Tags: art, asian-american, black, dance, fair use, film, mexican-american, music, native-american, theater