Preservation of Cultural Identity and Preventing Piracy of Indigenous Intellectual Properties

Abstract

While the benefits of modern communications in sustainable development could herald new opportunities, there are dangers associated with the introduction of such tools and programs, including cable television, from external environments into communities that have different technological status and cultural values if foreign contents are not managed to interact in harmony with local values. Violent clashes of cultures and possibly dilution of locally held values could result if education about the philosophical bases of the foreign culture is not provided in parallel. Therefore, frameworks such as the United Nations Television Forum should ensure that introduction of new media and programming into new cultural terrains are not wholesale endorsements of the external values depicted. No democratic society should legislate what its citizens could watch on television, however, each cultural domain could saturate its own airwaves with the programs that are deemed as culturally appropriate and cherished by local norms. Nyamba of the Université de Ouagadou in Burkina Faso for example, in his Aspects Sociologiques, Etude de Cas, described cultural attributes and social interactions in Africa and wondered if introduction of online messaging would obliterate the values inherent in the indigenous salutations (Nyamba, 1999).