Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/25/legal-bid-for-ecuador-forest-to-be-recognised-as-song-co-creator

Legal bid for Ecuador forest to be recognised as song co-creator

Petition to Ecuador’s copyright office is first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship

Patrick Barkham
Fri 25 Oct 2024 09.00 EDT

A forest in Ecuador could be recognised as the co-creator of a song under a groundbreaking legal proposal.

A petition is to be submitted to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognise the Los Cedros cloud forest as the co-creator of the composition Song of the Cedars. The action by the More Than Human Life (Moth) project is the first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship of a work of art.

The song contains melodies of echo-locating bats, howler monkeys, rustling leaves and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the spot where a new species of fungus was collected and described.

It was composed by the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane, field mycologist Giuliana Furci from the NGO Fungi Foundation and legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito during a field trip to Ecuador.

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“It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest,” said Macfarlane. “This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers comprise. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.”

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