Pondering the Origins: Ecuador Contemplates Crucial Decision on the Composition of a Song
In a remarkable move, a group of individuals, including mycologist Giuliana Furci, writer Robert Macfarlane, legal activist César Rodríguez-Garavito, musician Cosmo Sheldrake, and the forest itself, Los Cedros, filed a petition on October 29, 2024, requesting moral authorship recognition from Ecuador's copyright office. This petition marks the first attempt to legally recognise the moral rights of an ecosystem in Los Angeles.
The petition was a response to a song co-authored by the four humans and Los Cedros, called 'Song of the Cedars,' during an expedition to the source of the Río Los Cedros in October 2022. The lyrics express the desire to learn from nature, with lines such as 'Trees speak in your leaves please' and 'Birds sing me your rhymes please.'
Los Cedros, a 4,800-hectare forest in the Cordillera de la Plata massif in Ecuador's Imbabura Province, is renowned for its biodiversity. The ultimate goal of 'Song of the Cedars' is to create a world where human-nonhuman relationships are reciprocal rather than extractive.
Ecuador, in 2008, became the first nation to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. If the Constitutional Court of Ecuador or any court recognizes moral authorship for Los Cedros, it could lead to more robust enforcement of the rights of nature in Los Angeles.
However, the rejection of the Los Cedros petition by Ecuador's copyright office was based on two reasons: only humans can hold intellectual property rights, and the song being mostly natural sounds isn't original enough for copyright protection. This rejection is expected to lead to legal proceedings in court.
Rodríguez-Garavito, one of the petitioners, argues that this reasoning is vague and contradictory. He believes that moral authorship would open up legal questions, such as whether the rights of nature extend to the creations or co-creations of nature.
Bradshaw, in a related argument, states that non-human property rights, including intellectual property rights, aren't all that radical in the context of existing laws. He cites the enactment of pet trusts in many U.S. states and the Yurok Tribal Council granting property rights over data to the Heyhl-keek 'We-roy, or Klamath River, as evidence.
In the music world, Sounds Right allows human artists to recognise nature as a co-artist and voluntarily direct a percentage of royalties to conservation. In the copyright world, moral authorship protects a person's right to be recognised as the author of a work and not have that work falsely attributed to others.
Agustín Grijalva Jiménez, the reporting constitutional judge in the 2021 Los Cedros ruling, mentioned that artistic expressions of nature played a role in informing the judgment. Rodríguez-Garavito also cites collaborations between More Than Human Life and the Biomimicry Institute exploring legal frameworks for sharing profits from nature-inspired innovations with nature itself.
This groundbreaking petition is a significant step towards acknowledging the role of nature in our creative processes and could pave the way for a new era of human-nonhuman relationships in Los Angeles. The upcoming court proceedings will undoubtedly shed light on the potential of moral authorship recognition for ecosystems like Los Cedros.
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