engleski

The Challenges of Heritage and Copyright of Commercial Sound Recordings in former Yugoslavia(s)

Although contrasted, the concepts of safeguarding – oriented towards identity and community, and copyright – oriented towards ownership and profit, are at the same time unavoidably connected. The connection is not just perceptible from their similar starting points (protection of individual or collective intellectual property), but their paths also connect during a life course of a cultural expression. Aside from collective expressions, copyrighted authorial works can go into a process of heritagisation too, revoking a discourse of safeguarding. Such is the case with commercial recordings from the early phase of record industry. These recordings can be a resource for ethnomusicological research, bearing witness to the historic music worlds, musicians and circumstances in which music was being made. Drawing from the ethnomusicological research project on the beginnings of record industry in Croatia, this paper will present the historical connection between the copyright law and the record industry in former Yugoslavia, as well as the heritage discourse emerging around the artefacts of that industry today. In both Kingdom and socialist Yugoslavia, musicians and composers have been eager and prominent actors of both the record industry and the implementation of copyright and performing rights. The regulation of status of their recordings has been an issue in the past as well as today, as can be illustrated by the most recent episode of the long epilogue of “Jugoton”, the first record factory in socialist Yugoslavia, in which the concepts of copyright and heritage have once again been put forward in a struggle for rights, ownership and justice.

Early recordings, music industry, Yugoslavia, copyright, heritage

nije evidentirano