As modern citizens, we should, in theory, be enjoying more personal freedom than our hardworking forebears of past centuries. We can devote ourselves to our own arts and various spiritual interests, endowing our individual existence with more individuality and unique characteristics. After all, do we not live by a more global perspective with the whole world open to us? How many of us actually live by pursuing this kind of spiritual freedom and with the joy of creation?
Paradoxically, within the developmental onslaught of ‘new technowlogy’, the protection and expansion of intellectual property rights and the spirit of free creation have quickly begun to wither on the vine. Also, the results of human spiritual activities are absorbed into the mainstream ideology, gradually losing their inherent natural and benevolent characteristics.
The government of Macau, through myriad departments, is the host organizer of numerous design competitions in the city. Naturally, these competitions attract young and fresh design graduates in particular, who are keen to start building up a portfolio. In these competitions, there will always be cases where the host department will be ready to seize the winning design completely for its own use and purposes, such as in the promotion of the city, its events and attractions, which is only natural. Unfortunately, this is made possible by requiring the winning contestant to sign away the copyright and the right to authorship in a contract, and to transfer these rights to the department so it has the total ownership of the creative work.
When the creative industry basket is full of such intransigent government contracts, the young graduate in the above example can only follow the expected rules of the game, resulting in a creator unable to exercise the right to authorship. Yet the creative work can be publicly displayed and be used to develop into products of extension. It is not necessary for the name of the creator to be expressed in the work or in its related materials in accordance to the creator’s will. The work can be arbitrarily changed in such a way that distorts the original intention of the creator or the original meaning and expression of the work. Although the government does not take the creator’s intellectual property to such a level of disrespect most of the time, the contract is put forward to avoid disputes. By agreeing to the unfair terms, the innocent creator says “yes, I do” and willingly renounces all subsequent benefits derived from the creative work and its copyright for ever.
In Macau, the legal interpretation of the term ‘copyright’ is, at best, loose. There is an assumption in many departments that creative people and their work are never automatically given their dues after the contract is signed, and instead, the sponsoring entity or the investor (in the business world) is deemed the owner of the creative work. But in a healthy commercial environment, the actual creator of the work enjoys an agreed and reasonable economic compensation for the creation of the work, as well as retaining copyright. The same principle has, however, been corrupted by the many government-funded associations in Macau that commission creative projects, and further conversations are, at best, ignored.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The authority in the above example should be taking the lead in challenging such unfair contracts and should, instead, create an environment that is friendly to people engaged in creativity, and give them the greatest support on the issues of copyright. This should start with improving the law and abandoning the arrogant and irreverent attitude that pushes creative people to the back of the stage. Without it, the loss is not the individual property of a creative talent, but the cultural and the industrial development of the whole society.
