The Artists' Rights Initiative

For most of the last century, Afghan artists created without any copyright treaty connecting them to the rest of the world. We spent four years changing that. Now we are building what comes after it.

The problem

A country outside the system

Copyright is territorial. A song written in Kabul was protected — to whatever degree Afghan law provided — only inside Afghanistan. The moment it crossed a border it belonged, in practice, to whoever held the tape.

Afghanistan had no copyright treaty relationship with the United States or with any other country. Afghan musicians, filmmakers, writers and photographers had no standing to license their work abroad, no mechanism to collect on it, and no recourse when it was taken. Generations of recordings were reissued, sampled, monetized and claimed by parties who had never met the artist.

It was not a gap in enforcement. It was a gap in the law itself.

2014 – 2018

The campaign

In 2014, our founder began a multi-year advocacy campaign to bring Afghan artists inside international copyright protection. The work was done in close collaboration with the Arts & Entertainment Advocacy Clinic at the Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University — research, legal memoranda, and a sustained case made directly to the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C.

The argument was practical rather than abstract. Accession cost Afghanistan little and returned something it badly needed: a cultural export economy its own citizens could actually participate in, and a legal footing for the diaspora artists who carry the country's work abroad.

Afghanistan deposited its instrument of accession to the Berne Convention on March 2, 2018. It entered into force on June 2, 2018. For the first time, Afghan authors and composers held the same baseline protections as creators in more than 180 other countries — automatically, without formality, in every member state.

That experience became the foundation of a lifelong mission: to protect Afghan artists' rights, preserve Afghanistan's cultural heritage, and ensure that its artists' legacies are honored by those who rightfully carry them.

Afghanistan's Entry into the International IP Framework

Dec 13, 2005

WIPO Convention

May 14, 2017

Berne Convention

June 26, 2018

Madrid Protocol

Afghanistan becomes a WIPO member state — membership only, no substantive copyright obligations.

Copyright. Afghan literary, musical and artistic works gain automatic protection across the Berne Union. The milestone this initiative was built to reach.

International trademark registration.

Oct 26, 2018

Marrakesh VIP Treaty

Accessible-format works for blind and print-disabled readers.

Feb 9, 2021

WIPO Copyright Treaty · WPPT

Digital-era rights for authors, performers and producers of phonograms.

In under four years Afghanistan moved from almost no treaty protection to the core of the international intellectual property framework. Berne was the hinge.

What Berne changed — and what it did not

Protection abroad, automatically

An Afghan work is protected in every Berne member state from the moment it is fixed. No registration, no filing, no formality.

Standing to be heard

Afghan rights holders can assert claims in foreign courts and before platform and registry processes that previously had no basis to hear them.

A seat in the framework

Afghanistan entered the system that governs how culture moves, is licensed and is paid for across borders.

What it did not do is reach backward, or enforce itself. Rights on paper mean nothing to an artist who does not know she/he holds them, cannot afford counsel, and is watching her/him catalog reissued under someone else's name. Closing that distance is the work in front of us.

The Artists' Rights Workshop

We are building a free legal-education program for Afghan and Afghan-diaspora creators — musicians, filmmakers, photographers, writers and the cultural organizations that support them. Plain-language instruction on what rights they hold, how to document ownership, and what to do when work is taken.

The model already exists. Community Artists' Rights Workshops run by law school clinics pair a public presentation on copyright with supervised one-on-one consultations. We are in early conversation with the CREATE Law Clinic at the University of San Francisco School of Law, whose program we intend to adapt for a community whose records are scattered across three continents and forty years.

What copyright protects — original expression, not ideas and not objects. Who owns it and for how long.

Ownership & Licensing

Tangled contract histories, work-for-hire, inherited catalogs, and how to license work properly.

Artificial Intelligence

How generative AI is reshaping ownership, fair use and the protections available to human creators.

Enforcement

Registration, takedowns, cease-and-desist letters, and low-cost routes such as the Copyright Claims Board.

Preservation
The record itself

Rights are only half of it. Afghanistan's recorded cultural heritage — tapes, film, photographs, session logs, sheet music — survives in private hands, in diaspora attics, in radio archives that changed custody more than once. Much of it is undocumented and physically decaying.