The Music Copyright regime in Multiversal Bangladesh: A gainful succession or a system seeking evolution?

This thesis investigates the following: The Music Copyright regime in Multiversal Bangladesh: A gainful succession or a system seeking evolution? Research to date discusses the provisions of the existing copyright law in general, identifying inefficacies in implementation and enforcement without explaining how they developed and why they exist. This research focuses on accessing and explaining rationales behind the inefficacies and informs our theoretical and empirical understanding of the phenomenon.

My lived experience as a musician and a legal researcher, guided me to consider accessing copyright law in relation to commercial music contracts from a rights-based perspective of songwriters and performers. I obtained doctrinal data and employed thematic document analysis and utilised the theoretical lens of legal transplant and functionalism. Further, I conducted ‘semi-structured qualitative interviews’ with stakeholders of the Bangladeshi music industry. The combined application of IPA (Interpretative phenomenological analysis) and the Buddhist theory of “Emptiness” enabled me to interpret and analyse the qualitative data and to build upon the traditional doctrinal reading.

A key research finding is that the core inefficacies of the music copyright regime stems from laws and policies being constructed without taking the cultural, socio-economic and contextual history of this region into account. The widespread culture of unawareness within which this regime developed, created a complex landscape that is unmanageable. I conclude that musicians are skipping this complex era and bypassing the record labels and publishing houses to produce music by themselves, that they can publish through the Internet. Only proper amendments and implementations of law and policies can provide the support that this sector need to bring about this much needed evolution. I suggest that this can be achieved by considering contextual background and determining what constitutes the music copyright regime. I identify the components and explain how changes in them can influence the machinery of the copyright regime. This study will inform law and policy makers, academics and future researchers involved in this field.