Question

Intellectual property law has traditionally been anchored in the concept of fixation; to be eligible for copyright protection, an expression must be reduced to a tangible medium. This requirement poses a significant obstacle for the protection of Indigenous oral traditions, which are inherently fluid, performative, and communally held. In an attempt to bridge this gap, some legal scholars have advocated for a "fixation by proxy" approach, suggesting that oral traditions be systematically recorded and transcribed to fit within existing legal paradigms.

While such archival efforts are often well-intentioned, they fundamentally alter the nature of the traditions they seek to protect. The act of recording freezes a living, evolving narrative into a static artifact. Furthermore, under standard copyright frameworks, the act of transcription often vests intellectual property rights in the individual who fixes the work—the ethnographer or recorder—rather than the community that generated and sustained the tradition.

Consequently, the effort to squeeze Indigenous oral traditions into traditional copyright structures is not merely legally awkward; it is culturally reductive. If legal systems are to offer genuine protection to these traditions, they cannot rely on retrofitting archaic copyright requirements. Instead, legislators must develop a sui generis framework of communal intellectual property rights—one that protects fluid, collectively owned expressions without requiring them to be fixed in a tangible medium.

Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?