SUMMARY

Created Here, Held Elsewhere reads Jamaica, The Bahamas, Barbados and the United Kingdom together as one corridor, meaning four places connected by the same families, catalogues, audiences and money rather than by proximity. It sets what their governments and agencies have committed to against what those commitments currently deliver.

Caribbean collecting societies have licensed Caribbean repertoire through their own regional database since 2021, returning the large majority of what they collect to the people who made the work. Art districts, industry alliances and diaspora technology networks have each built a piece of the same agenda, most of them ahead of policy. The capability is not missing. It is distributed, and it has no room in which to meet.

Read side by side, the four records show the same three gaps in all of them: who owns creative work supported by public money, who holds a seat in the institutions now being built, and what happens once value crosses a border.

All four jurisdictions have a strategy, policy, mapping, or framework open right now, and a licensing market is forming around artificial intelligence that will pay whoever can prove ownership. The next two years will settle more than the ten that follow them.

J2N Atkinson wrote and published this independently. Not commissioned, not funded, and open to response and discussion.