Issues of copyright, creativity, and cultural heritage crop up frequently in daily life and in the most unlikely situations. For example, in July 2015, a teenager from North Korea sought asylum at the South Korean consulate in Hong Kong, where he had been taking part in a mathematics competition. ^{Footnote 1} This sensitive incident, which has been hushed up by local government officials, has stirred much curiosity among the general public. One Hong Kong netizen commented that the story of the young defector would make a good movie. Another concurred but asked who, then, should own the copyright of the story, which is the young man’s and the product of a peculiar regime or culture, but which would likely be sold to a film studio. The question of whether the teenager, or other parties, should have a claim to the story, instantly piqued my interest. Yet I cannot help asking: to ensure that a story with such immeasurable humanistic values would benefit as many as possible, should it not be made free and accessible to all?

Despite the seminal role of copyright in cultural heritage and the collective memories of societies, it has not received sufficient attention from humanities and cultural studies scholars. Helle Porsdam’s book, the fruit of a three-year research collaboration involving leading European universities, enriches this academic arena by addressing the interrelationships among creativity, cultural heritage institutions, and copyright. It attempts to answer questions concerning the ownership of cultural heritage, the expansion of creative possibilities brought about by the digital age and its impacts on legal regimes, and the tensions between the safeguarding of cultural heritage and the dissemination of knowledge about culture.

The first part of the book examines copyright ownership and the roles of museums and libraries in an era of contradictions, when “transnational studies” are becoming increasing popular, while international dialogues about cultural property are becoming more regional and/or nation oriented. Martin Skrydstrup discusses the resurgence of national and native claims to artifacts held by heritage institutions in Western metropolises over the past three decades and asks how one should understand cultural property and its relationship with museums. Lucky L. Belder affirms the importance of museums, archives, and libraries in providing sustainable access to cultural heritage. Darryl Mead and Fred Saunderson, holding the vision that national libraries will play a significant role in supporting future creative works, explores the intricate relationship between creators rights, collective heritage, and the future role of libraries in facilitating creative endeavors. Balázs Bodó further offers insights into what these libraries should look like, as he argues that book pirates of the twenty-first century may provide a workable model of how texts in electronic form can be stored, organized, and circulated.

The second part of the book examines the relationship between copyright and the arts. Fiona Macmillan discovers how activities in arts festivals can not only be mapped onto existing categories of copyrighted works and become a channel for distributing these works but can also be regarded as a form of cultural heritage with public and communal values potentially in conflict with such rights. Stina Teilmann-Lock uses cutlery as an example to show how Danish design law in the twentieth century reveals the changing relationship between copyright and creativity, which, in turn, affects the formation and dissemination of art and culture in society. Peter Schneck turns to American literature to address the problems in the understanding of literature as a cultural property, which remains defined by the struggle between conflicting notions of individual and collective ownership.

Finally, the third part of the book explores authorship, copyright, and the public domain by foregrounding the contrast between traditional Romanticist notions of authorship that inform copyright law, which see authors as working in isolation and collective authorship in an age of file sharing and peer-to-peer ideology. Mark Fredriksson discusses the increasingly politicized questions of copyright and piracy and the formation of the pirate parties movement aimed at revitalizing the public sphere and promoting a wider access to a common cultural heritage. Kim Treiger-Bar-Am looks at the transformative-use defense, especially with regard to appropriation art, and proposes a hermeneutic approach that would enable courts to accept transformativity in appropriation art and to further copyright’s goal of encouraging and promoting creativity.

Undoubtedly, Porsdam’s book is not the first one that touches upon the above issues. Works abound that address copyright and the digital age. For instance, Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity examines the creative process and laws in the digital age. ^{Footnote 2} Copyright in the Cultural Industries, edited by Ruth Towse, questions the ability of copyright to meet the new challenges of a digital era. ^{Footnote 3} Over the past decade, the relationship between intellectual property and cultural heritage has also received increasing attention. Some examples are New Frontiers of Intellectual Property Law: Intellectual Property and Cultural Heritage, Geographical Indicators, Enforcement, Overprotection, edited by Christopher Heath and Anselm Kamperman Sanders, and Cultural Economics and Cultural Policies (2015), edited by Alan Peacock and Ilde Rizzo. ^{Footnote 4} Yet Porsdam’s book is an unprecedented collection that brings together essays addressing cultural heritage, creativity, and copyright in the digital era as well as providing up-to-date discussions and fresh perspectives on these issues.

Although Porsdam emphasizes that this project is deliberately geared towards Europe and European laws, it includes numerous discussions of American law, history, and even literature. Interestingly enough, it begins with Skrydstrup’s chapter comparing different concepts of cultural property in the United States (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act [NAGPRA] regime) and Europe (the UTIMUT regime). ^{Footnote 5} Treiger-Bar-Am’s discussion of the fair use/fair dealing defenses in US and UK copyright law, especially their convergence with regard to the idea of transformative use, neatly rounds up this volume. Hence, such a diversity of materials may come as a pleasant surprise to the reader.

What is refreshing about the discussions of copyright and art works is the deconstructive approach to the arts in Macmillan’s and Teilmann-Lock’s chapters. Macmillan’s work in particular goes against the conventional understanding that arts constitute the subject matter of copyright, arguing that copyright law has at least contributed to the compartmentalization of art disciplines. Through studying the nature of arts festivals, she turns what might at first seem to be an unconvincing argument into a persuasive one. Teilmann-Locke’s discussion of the interaction between copyright and the arts, especially the murky boundaries between art and design, copy and original, legal and illegal, is nothing short of inspiring.

Porsdam’s volume hopefully would lead to other fruitful debates on cultural heritage and copyright in the digital age and on finding the right balance between cultures, users, and intellectual property rights holders, both corporate and private. Given that copyright serves to stimulate creativity as much as to protect the interests of authors or rights holders, in these future endeavors, the intellectual property rights holder may appear less as the bad guy than as a party whose rights must be balanced against the others. Back to the story of the defector: by selling his story to the production company, he may help turn to turn it into an educational and entertaining film that reflects his personality and heritage and remains highly accessible to the public.