Description

Copyright is very much in the air today, especially with Google’s controversial project to digitize, theoretically at least, every published book. Wikipedia defines copyright as ‘a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work.’ Such legal understandings notwithstanding, copyright is largely historical and culturally contingent. Taking up the case of colonial and postcolonial Tamilnadu this talk will look at how authorship was historically understood and how its meaning changed with the advent of print. Given the narrow market and the limited commercial potential of the business of books, I will argue that copyright was debated not in the courts but negotiated culturally. I will also explore the unprecedented move of successive governments of Tamilnadu, starting with the nationalization of the works of the iconic Tamil poet Subramania Bharati, to put the works of Tamil writers into the public domain.

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A.R. Venkatachalapathy is Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai. Chalapathy has taught at universities in Tirunelveli, Madras and Chicago, and has held research assignments in Paris, Cambridge, London and Harvard. Apart from his writings in English he has written/edited over twenty books in Tamil. His publications include In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History (Yoda, 2006), (ed.) Chennai, Not Madras (Marg, 2006), (ed.) In the Tracks of the Mahatma: The Making of a Documentary (Orient Longman, 2006) and Love Stands Alone: Selections from Tamil Sangam Poetry (Penguin, 2010).