Margaret Maitland has posted an articulate response to the proposed bill on her blog. Her post provides a very useful reflection of the many opinions that I have heard about the proposal since it was publicized. In this extract, Margaret echoes one of my own feelings of total bewilderment about the bill, which questions why Egypt should wish to alienate the opportunity for free PR:
The way I see it, reproductions are actually free advertising for the Egyptian Tourism Board. In my experience, the plastic (rather grotesque) King Tut mask that my mom got me for Hallowe’en when I was a child only further fueled my desire to one day visit Egypt myself. Around the world, similar trinkets and architectural homages only remind us of the much greater wonders that lie in Egypt itself. In the International Herald Tribune, the lawyer Jeffrey P. Weingart states: ‘Anytime someone seeks to promote and profit from artistic or photographic expression, one walks a fine line between promoting its use on the one hand and protecting material on the other’.
See the above page for the full post.
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