Caribbean Law

By Abiola Inniss LLB,LLM,ACIarb It is hardly debatable that the variations in copyright laws across the Caribbean are the result of the peculiarities of our various jurisdictions compounded by the lack of a regional regulatory scheme. It is also trite knowledge that Caribbean musicians often struggle to obtain adequate protection of their productions and where they do, it is localized within specific countries. This means that while a Jamaican musician may have protected rights in Jamaica, this will not necessarily apply to the same work in Guyana or Antigua, and so on; though section 3 of the Jamaican Copyright Act no 5 of 1993 ,specifies that where a work has been first published in a specified country it shall be an offence in Jamaica to republish it without permission. A January 2010 report of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) revealed that royalties accruing to Caribbean music and Art in 2009 had dipped by 27 percent t...

Applying Alternative Dispute Resolution Within Communities. By Abiola Inniss LLB, LLM (Business Law) ACIArb. In 1976 at the Pound Conference of the United States of America Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger as he then was, on the subject of finding a better way declared ” We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated. We have reached the point where our systems of justice—both state and federal—may literally break down before the end of the century .” This was a key point in advocating the use of ADR in the United States which was widely touted at the time as an alternative to the formal system of justice then in place. From the seventies to present there have been many projects implemented all across the United States with varying degrees of success from which valued lessons we may derive some wisdom on the subject of applying ADR in communities. We will also take a look ...