The problem is when corporations make facade copies of cultural heritage to profit from them, while the cultures that originated them not only get nothing out of it, but are actively oppressed in the meantime. That is your typical Taco Bell phenomenon (notice how Taco Bell almost never comes up in the public discussion?)
The public discussion is full of examples where some kid makes a Native American hairdress from feathers they found. No corporation profit, nothing is taken, and as long as it's not part of some roleplay where the natives are the bad guys to be killed by the good cowboys, it's also not necessarily reproductive of oppressive structures. The fact that the debate is skewed this way is already a misrepresentation.
Now, a corporation that got billions in tax credits and research from the government, making software off the labor of underpaid and overworked developers, deprived of their revenue model because someone copied it? Not cultural appropriation in the least.
A deeper point: The public-facing version of cultural appropriation is also low-key ethnic nationalist, because it objectifies ethnicities and the belonging to them, and holds them eternally stable at that. It reinforces "natural" ideas od being a member of any ethnic group, which is the exact opposite of any emancipatory discourse on race and ethnicity.
This extends to other things; like I eat potatoes; which were domesticated by Native Americans. I purchased mine from Lidl which probably makes a profit from them. Is that cultural appropriation?
Culture isn't proprietary to a group, and these groups aren't objectively demarcated in any way. To even say "Risotto belongs to the Italians!" is to make statements on who Italians are, and pretend that this is some immutable, objective group, and that for some reason, there is this magical doorstep that if you carry Risotto over it turns it bad. It's when the corporation pretends to "take" this cultural heritage as a marketing facade that they're appropriation something nobody owns, to then turn a profit from it.
SO, I apologize for my mangled point. Culture isn't proprietary. Languages and food and customs and songs and stories travel. This is what makes human dynamism. Cultural appropriation is the act of trying to take possession of it. The very act of copyrighting something communal is the problem.
I love that line and it makes perfect sense.
What does it mean to own stuff? Clearly more entity classes than individuals can own stuff—much IP is owned by companies, a legal fiction of an individual owned by people in the class of shareholder with generous but limited dispositional power held by people classed as company officers.
Some cultures have established foundations and such to own things, like the Free Software Foundation or the Scientologists. Some fishing rights are granted to certain cultures which pre-existed contemporary government.
Whether that is by sharing the proceeds of the creation, some state budget or whatever is the next question, but we need ways for creators to be able to create while sustaining a proper life, else there can't be "serious" new creative pieces.
And for some works (software, orchestra music, movie, ...) you also need not only one person but a large group with organisation and all.
I think it is exact opposite: the fact that pizza is one of the most popular foods worldwide benefits Italians. Any Italian can brag: we invented pizza. Also any Jamaican can brag: my homies invented reggae music. It doesn't matter that much whether a reggae song that you can hear in the radio was made by an actual Jamaican or not. Copying is the greatest compliment.
The margarita probably was created by Raffaele Esposito who had a restaurant and could sell Pizza to a large enough degree to refinance it as the value wasn't in the recipe, but in the exact way the produced it and having an oven and the restaurant and anybody who wanted to sell their versions had to invest in an oven and ingredients and then needs skills to make a better pizza.
However if i record a music album and I have no protection anybody can copy it for free, without any investment and in the current system the original musicians have no benefit as each copy of the recording would be equally well.
No.
By the same token "discrimination" is seen as being defacto wrong even though no-one would take issue with the fact that you literally distinguish people by their physical attributes "yeah, he's the one with the brown hair".
It literally means "the bad form of cultural copying". As "discrimination" in common parlance means "the bad form of discrimination".
Contrast with the sentence "how do I discriminate between French and German words in this text". In that context, 'discriminate' doesn't have a negative bent. But in basically any context to do with real people it does.
Linguistics(?) is hard...
Discrimination is the act of deciding whether two things are the same, or different. Even "racial discrimination" would be OK in principle, were it not for the fact that the concept of races has been widely been debunked by scientists.
To be clear, discriminatory treatment based on people's characteristics is deeply objectionable to me.
First, cultural appropriation is a white, progressive concept. It's not something generally considered /wrong/. If I wear Indian clothing in India, Arab clothing in the Middle East, or similar, that's usually viewed well in those cultures. I think part of this is why one is doing this -- there's a big difference between wearing a mockery of an Cherokee outfit for Halloween with complete ignorance of Cherokee culture, and with trying to culturally adapt out of respect for a culture. A second, much bigger piece, though, is cultural; the Western concept of identity, and the signalling mechanisms behind it, are just that: Western concepts. That doesn't mean other cultures don't have analogous concepts, but they're different in sometimes subtle and sometimes significant ways.
Second, violating a patent doesn't involve duplicating cultural or economic artefacts. If you've ever written a large program, you've probably stepped on dozens of software patents, without even knowing it.
Third, there's a difference between the general concept, and the specific mechanisms. There is nothing fundamental about inventions being protected for 20 years from the date of invention, or any of the other specifics of those mechanisms.
Fourth, a lot of this is fundamental to other forms of interchange and human interaction. If I sanction a nation from using Word, SolidWorks, Adobe CS, etc., one piece are the specific economic artefacts. The second piece is the ability to interact with all of the creative content those economic artefacts are required for. Most of these have intentionally locked-down and proprietary formats, sometimes with DRM. I feel less bad about cutting someone out of being able to use a tool I built, and more bad about cutting someone out from being able to interact with any content created with that tool. I feel especially bad about cutting people out from content they created themselves. If a country has piles of videos they created in Adobe CS which they suddenly can't use any more, that feels like overreach.
Finally, it's worth acknowledging a lot of the lead in IP came from a history of imperialism. Britain has cultural artefacts from around the world in its museums, and much of Western wealth comes from accumulated interest on plunder from around the world. It's not quite clear what a fair outcome is here.
I do feel countries should be able to make their own IP regimes.
It does. In my opinion, cultural appropriation shouldn't be a thing. It's a big deal in the US, but Greeks, Turks and Slavs have copied each other's language, food, songs, and mannerisms for centuries and we're better off for it. It's remixing.
I know, that's happened a lot in the past, but aren't we moving towards recognising that was wrong and figuring out more respectful forms of cultural and commercial interchange?