Battleangel

Slyck reports that Afghanistan has been prodded towards accepting western IP laws.

PakTribune - A commission - advised by international experts - has been set up to formulate the laws as soon as possible after carrying out a comprehensive study, information and culture and justice ministry officials said.

Sayed Fazl Sancharaki, deputy minister for information and culture, believed Afghanistan badly needed such legislation, which should have been put in place much earlier. “Authors of scholarly and scientific works have long been faced with problems in our country due to the absence of such laws.”

“I am against it because, for instance, if I want to translate a French book into my language, I will have to pay a fee to the author according to the convention. Nobody here is in a position to pay for that,” [Celebrated short-story writer Rahnaward] Zaryab argued.

Not so surprising this was also among the first pieces of legislation considered in Iraq. I guess many are perplexed as to why newly formed governments as well as international experts would focus on copyright instead of, say, things that have to do with everyday survival. And that it seems arrogant and manipulative to enforce copyright while people still die from disease, violence and poverty.
But I say that those people who gasp over this do give the US and its international cohort too much credit and have generally misunderstood the reasons for international involvement and its mandate. The rest are properly indefatigable market liberals and free trade proponents who have no ideological basis for questioning the rationale behind this. The latter may even go so far as to hint that it is Afghanistan’s lack of economic liberalism and corresponding IP that lies at the center of its plight. Yes really. Not so much years of American terror, murder and rape, warlords and a decade of Russian atrocities before that (provoked by the US mind you), but the lack of free markets. Does that sound like a simplistic nightmare? It is. And ironically the same people who praise the free market as the universal solution and saviour are often the ones that caused the aforementioned armed conflicts in the first place. Often in the search for new markets. It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin.

It is fairly predictable that market liberalists and apologists for such would undertake these exact steps when first getting access to a “gap nation.” Despicable but sadly predictable.
One would also appreciate if just once, people could be left to draft their own laws without international “experts” looking over their shoulder. It’s demeaning and conformist. There are few fields besides the practise of “law” where this tactic would be accepted as anything but colonialism and racism.