Regulating Cultural Performances in Oceania: the Complicated Relationship between Law, Creativity and Cultural Property

This paper explores a number of tensions around claims of rights over various aspects of cultural performance with a particular focus on the Cook Islands. We discuss the historical context of these tensions and trace the way in which certain anxieties and agendas have led to demands for, and the realisation of, new laws over cultural performances, most particularly the Copyright Act 2013 and the Traditional Knowledge Act 2013. We then discuss how such new regulatory frameworks have a potentially critical role to play in determining who has the rights to perform what, with effects that are likely to spill out from the confines of laws and court cases into popular discourses around claims over many manifestations of culture and creativity