Initial Assignment

For the first class of the semester, please consider and be prepared to discuss the following problem:

The Dek people (one of the indigenous groups inhabiting the tiny independent country of North Trinian) are the stewards of one of the world's oldest continuous musical traditions. The strikingly unusual melodies which they perform today on instruments fashioned from local materials have been transmitted, essentially unchanged, over countless generations. For most of this time, the Deks have had no contact with the outside world; however, in recent years their forest settlements have been visited by Western mineral prospectors and anthropologists. In 1993, one of the latter (Dr. Vivian Wachs) secured the permission of a secondary Dek chief to make tape recordings of their performances.

Dr. Wachs (a German national) has made these recordings available to the general public over the Internet, without charge, by means of a site she maintains on the World Wide Web; visitors to the site can download digital files containing the recordings. Although they have been edited somewhat for length, the recordings available on Wachs' website are otherwise a faithful and respectful rendition of the Dek people's music.

While some visitors to the Wachs site download the files merely in order to be able to listen to the Dek, others make a range of further uses of the material. Felix Flyte, a "world music" impresario who charges visitors to his own website, had "improved" certain musical selections from Wachs' tapes by laying in additional tracks of Western instruments and vocals. However, he continues to describe the results as "authentic Dek traditional compositions." (Flyte is based in New York, but his site draws visitors from all over the physical and virtual world.) Meanwhile, the First National Bank of Eastern Moldavia has adopted one of Wachs' recordings of a Dek melody as the thematic background music for a new television advertising campaign. Having learned of Flyte's and the Bank's activities, both the leaders of the Dek people and Dr. Wachs are upset and concerned.

Obviously, we don't have nearly enough information to come to any conclusions about the rights and wrongs of this situation. What kind of information would we need in order to be able to begin to analyze the question of who may have actions against whom, for what, and where?

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