Joint authorship is insufficient to solve the advantage
Torsen 8, Consultant, The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Creative Heritage Project; Vice President, The International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI) (Molly, “REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND TRADITIONAL CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS: A SYNOPSIS OF CURRENT ISSUES,” 3 Intercultural Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 199, Lexis)//BB
Western copyright law assigns its bundle of rights to individual people or individual legal entities. Joint authorship for purposes of copyright has a narrow interpretation and would probably not allow for the kind of communal ownership that a clan or tribe would find useful. In the United States, for example, the benefits of authorship can be divvied amongst joint authors but, for an entire culture or clan, that kind of rights management would be extremely difficult if not impossible, due to the fact that entire tribes and clans consider themselves, as a whole, stewards and caretakers of their culture. "Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work. The authors of a joint work are co-owners of copyright in the work." 28 Communal rights are gaining some attention but Western copyright regimes remain focused on single, identifiable authors.