This ground-breaking book examines the multifaceted dynamics between copyright law and music borrowing within a rich diversity of music genres from across the world. It evaluates how copyright laws under different generic conventions may influence, or are influenced by, time-honoured creative borrowing practices.

Leading experts from around the world scrutinise a carefully selected range of musical genres, including pop, hip-hop, jazz, blues, electronic and dance music, as well as a diversity of region-specific genres, such as Jamaican music, River Plate Tango, Irish folk music, Hungarian folk music, Flamenco, Indian traditional music, Australian indigenous music, Maori music and many others.

This genre-conscious analysis builds on a theoretical section in which musicologists and lawyers offer their insights into fundamental issues concerning music genre categorisation, the typology of music borrowing and copyright law’s ontological struggle with musical borrowing in theory and practice. The chapters are threaded together by a central theme, ie, that the cumulative nature of music creativity is the result of collective bargaining processes among many ‘musicking’ parties that have socially constructed creative music authorship under a rich mix of generic conventions.

Jonathan Barrett considers the delicate balance between open engagement between cultures and cultural appropriation, within the context of Maori music of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand … An ambitious aim that Barrett achieves in an engaging and candid chapter.
This edited collection will be enjoyed by scholars and practitioners interested in music and copyright, as well as musical cultural heritage. The in-depth genre-by genre analysis provides a unique contribution to the literature on music borrowing.

Enrico Bonadio is Reader in Intellectual Property Law at City, University of London, UK.
Chen Wei Zhu is Associate Professor at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, UK.