"Stealing Our Heritage?": Women's Folksongs, Copyright Law, and the Public Domain in Algeria

World music inspired by folklore poses complex issues of authorship, remuneration, and belonging. In Algeria, discussions about the world music genre called new Kabyle song frequently question whether new singers have adequately represented a song's folk origins to the copyright agency. Starting from these debates, the paper examines locally specific ways in which copyright law, understood as a particular mode of circulating texts through their attachment to authors, is being used to generate new relationships to women's repertoires in Algeria and produce new notions of who can be imagined as an author and how authorship itself can be conceived.