Indigenous knowledge affirmation
‘Global legislation on indigenous knowledge‘ by Anju Sharma is an excellent review of global trends in the protection of indigenous knowledge. Sharma outlines developments as either defensive or positive strategies for protecting or affirming indigenous communities’ interests in developing countries.
Defensive strategies include defining indigenous systems as unpatentable, developing databases of indigenous knowledge products, or forcing companies to make public the origin of their products and agreements with the communities from which those products are derived.
Positive strategies involve educating communities as to the economic viability of the information that they hold.
The latter is really important for developing countries, and perhaps the most effective strategy in the long term. Education and awareness will result in the empowerment of communities to be able to compete in the global marketplace, rather than seeing people as victims and pawns of a global economy in which they play no part.
It is this ‘positive’ role that Creative Commons plays in the realm of international copyright law. Instead of trying to change a system which emphasises individual or corporate control over knowledge, Creative Commons uses contract law to enable individuals to cede some rights to the community from where their knowledge was derived.
There are no easy answers to these questions, and Creative Commons is by no means the only way to solve problems of global intellectual property abuse, but it is definitely the most viable temporary solution while the law catches up.
Now we must just speed up Creative Commons for patent law and we’ll be on our way to finding a global solution.