The emergence of P2P technologies has reconfigured the relationship between protest and music by politicizing the modes of music distribution. Protest music has indeed always relied on alternative distribution networks. Still, the ideological significance attributed to open P2P networks and pirate radio channels defines the mode of distribution itself as liberating, regardless of the content that is distributed. If previous music movements have aimed to achieve something outside itself—peace, equality, freedom—then the piracy movement essentially sees the freedom of distribution as a means to its own end. This movement has been countered by a growing range of legal and commercial streaming services controlled by the music industry. At the same time, new technologies have enabled other alternative distribution networks. This chapter discusses the digital radio piracy collective Noisebridge against a long history of media piracy and renegade radio networks to highlight the inherent connection between hacking, piracy, and alternative media distribution.

This article examines 51 of the Swedish Copyright Act 1960, generally known as 'the protection of classics' in relation to international discourses on copyright in the mid-twentieth century. The provision in 51 protects works of cultural significance by deceased authors and artists against reproductions that are considered offensive, even if the works are in the public domain. This article analyses the arguments and motives that led Swedish legislators to draft 51 and contextualises them internationally. The origin of the protection of classics is rooted in the notion of a paying public domain, a provision which existed in various countries in the twentieth century that allowed the state to collect royalties for works in the public domain. In Swedish copyright law this economic right was reinterpreted as a moral right to protect classical works. Unlike conventional moral rights, this right aimed at protecting the interests of the public rather than the integrity of the author. The protection of classics, and to an extent the notion of a paying public domain, can be seen not so much as a regulation of intellectual property but more as a statement about cultural heritage. By showing how the protection of classics operated within the international discourse on copyright law of the twentieth century, this article explores the relation between moral rights, a paying public domain and cultural heritage.

For most of the 19th century Swedish copyright law was primarily regulated by the Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1812, which merely stated that ‘Any writing is the property of the author or its legal proprietor’. It was not until 1877 that Sweden passed a separate, comprehensive copyright law. This was initially motivated by the fact that copyright was becoming much too extensive and complicated an issue to be regulated in a constitutional law. Apart from addressing many of the practicalities surrounding the exchange and sale of literary rights, the 1877 Copyright Act also introduced two important novelties in Swedish copyright law. First, it imposed a fixed time limitation on the protection of copyright; while the previous law had, in practice, allowed for an eternal extension of copyright protection, the new act limited this to 50 years after the death of the author. Secondly, the 1877 Copyright Act provided a certain, although very limited, copyright protection for translated works stating that original authors retained their copyright for works translated from Swedish into Norwegian or Danish. This was the most controversial part of the new law as many publishers saw this as a limitation of what they thought of as their ‘freedom to translate’ which, they argued, could limit public access to literature.

Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1810 was not only a return to the liberal ideals that shaped the famous Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1766 (sometimes referred to as the world’s first freedom of the press act), but it was also, arguably, Sweden’s first copyright regulation. This was indeed the first time that authors’ rights to the works they produced were acknowledged in Swedish law, although it was only mentioned in one paragraph, stating that ‘Any writing is the property of the author or its legal proprietor.’ The inclusion of authors’ rights in the Freedom of the Press Ordinance was largely uncontroversial and uncontested, and this commentary argues that it was most likely included because many of those involved in drafting the legislation were not only politicians but also authors and intellectuals. As such, they were familiar with the debates on authors’ rights in England and on the continent at the time. However, unlike in other European countries, the legislators did not elaborate on the nature and limitations of literary ownership, but merely assumed that the ownership of texts was to be equated with any other form of material property. Consequently, early Swedish copyright came to be entirely unlimited in time.

In the mid-19th century Swedish copyright law was regulated in the Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1812, which merely stated that ‘Any writing is the property of the author or its legal proprietor’. This implied that copyright was to be seen as any other property right and that the ownership of texts was unlimited in time. This changed in 1841 when Sweden passed an addition to the copyright paragraph stating that copyright protection expired if the copyright holder or its heirs did not publish or reissue the works within 20 years. Since the copyright holders were still allowed to republish the work as many times as they wished, the law in practice still allowed for an infinite extension of the copyright protection. This revision was nevertheless principally important since it was the first time that Swedish law acknowledged that literary property needed to be addressed differently from material property. The discussion preceding the revision also introduced the interests of the public in Swedish copyright law for the first time, as it referred to the need to make literature publicly available as an argument for imposing potential limitations on the terms of protection.

This article analyzes India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) as a potential intervention in the administration of patent law. The TKDL is a database including a vast body of traditional medical knowledge from India, aiming to prevent the patenting and misappropriation of that knowledge. This article contextualizes the TKDL in relation to documentation theory as well as to existing research on the uses of databases to protect traditional knowledge. It explores the TKDL’s potential consequences for India’s traditional medical knowledge and the wider implications that traditional knowledge databases can have for the safeguarding of traditional knowledge in general. The article concludes that on the one hand the TKDL bridges the gap between the main branches of Indian traditional medicine and the formal knowledge system of International Patent Classifications. Furthermore, it has also inspired revisions of the International Patent Classification system, which makes it better adapted to incorporate traditional medical knowledge. On the other hand, critical research on traditional knowledge documentation argues that traditional knowledge databases, like the TKDL, can decontextualize the knowledge they catalogue and dispossess its original owners. The TKDL, however, also fits into a national, Indian agenda of documenting and modernizing traditional medicine that predates the formation of the TKDL by several decades and challenges the dichotomy between traditional and scientific knowledge systems that originally motivated the formation of the TKDL.

This article applies a cultural perspective on § 51of the Swedish Copyright Act, which prohibits therendering of works in the public domain ‘in a waythat offends the interests of spiritual cultivation’(SFS 1960:729). This so called ‘protection of clas-sics’ was formulated in the 1950s to protect classicalworks against derogatory interpretations, such aspopular cultural adaptions. § 51 has rarely beenapplied, but in 2021 it was for the first time triedin court as the nationalist website Nordfront wasaccused of violating §51 by publishing works bythree prominent romanticist poets in a contextbordering on hate speech. The court ruled that thepublication was not a violation of § 51, which callsthe future of the protection of classics into question.Even though §51 might soon be obsolete, it raises anumber of questions regarding the relation betweenlaw and culture. This article discusses what theprotection of classics and the Nordfront case cantell us about cultural change in postwar Sweden if itis approached as a cultural rather than a legal textand studied not primarily as a legislative processbut as a process of meaning making. The articlemakes no attempts to conduct such an analysis butrather aims to introduce the perspective and presentpreliminary reflections on how the formulation anduse of protection of classics reflects changing con-ceptions of cultural norms and values.

This article analyses how local, national and international interests are reflected in India’s attempts to protect traditional knowledge through the formation of a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). It compares how the digital library is contextualised within India’s domestic policy with how it is presented to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The article argues that WIPO has endorsed the Indian initiative and embraced the promotion of protective databases as an uncontroversial tool that diverts attention from more contested forms of traditional knowledge protection. Consequently, India has been able to use WIPO as a platform to promote itself and the TKDL to the global community. Domestically, however, the library serves other purposes. Since it systematically documents a vast body of traditional medical knowledge, Indian authorities can use the library to claim that knowedge as part of a national cultural heritage, and as a source of scientific innovations to the economic and social benefit of the country. In that regard, the TKDL reflects an interplay among local, national and international interests, where the goal of protecting the traditional knowledge of indigenous and local communities against misappropriation risks being co-opted to serve national purposes.

Organization scholars have extensively studied both the politics of organization and the organization of politics. Contributing to the latter, we argue for further and deeper consideration of political parties, since: (1) parties illuminate organizational dynamics of in- and exclusion; (2) internal struggles related to the constitution of identities, practices, and procedures are accentuated in parties; (3) the study of parties allow for the isolation of processes of normative and affective commitment; (4) parties prioritize and intensify normative control mechanisms; (5) party organizing currently represents an example of profound institutional change, as new (digital) formations challenge old bureaucratic models. Consequently, we argue that political parties should be seen as ‘critical cases’ of organizing, meaning that otherwise commonplace phenomena are intensified and exposed in parties. This allows researchers to use parties as magnifying glasses for zooming-in on organizational dynamics that may be suppressed or concealed by the seemingly non-political façade of many contemporary organizations. In conclusion, we argue that organization scholars are in a privileged position to investigate how political parties function today and how their democratic potential can be improved in the future. To this end, we call on Organization and Management Studies to engage actively with alternative parties in an attempt to explore and promote progressive change within the formal political system.