Two fairly new websites that are focused on facets of heritage protection:
--Recalling Ancestral Voices, a Finnish site promoting repatriation of Sámi heritage, especially material culture.
--The blog Photoreturn, created by two Dutch scholars and dedicated to the repatriation of historical photographs. Not much content in either one yet, but worth checking out. 20 May 2008.

Be sure to read Evan Ratliff's, “Law of the Jungle,” Wired, June 2008, an article on the circumstances surrounding Brazil's prosecution (and persecution) of conservation biologist Marc van Roosmalen in connection with charges related to alleged biopiracy.

Ratliff’s article is first-rate, but like countless journalists before him, he repeats a yarn that now seems obligatory in stories about bioprospecting: that Eli Lilly “stole” the active ingredients of the rosy periwinkle from Madagascar and derived millions of dollars from this act of biopiracy without sharing any of the profits with its country of origin. This grossly oversimplified tale is endlessly repeated in books, articles, and websites, as I discovered years ago while doing background research for Who Owns Native Culture?  It is a canard that refuses to die. For those (few) who care about the moral complexity of drug discovery, here are the relevant paragraphs from WONC.  No, I am not a defender of biopiracy. But it's useful to get the facts right.

Australia's opposition party pushes for plan to guarantee royalties for Aboriginal artists whose work increases in value through re-sale. ABC News, 4 April 2008.

"The Opposition's Indigenous affairs spokeswoman, Sharman Stone, is meeting with Aboriginal artists in Darwin today. Dr Stone says making sure artists get fair payment for the rising value of their work is important for the future of the art industry. 'Each time the work of art changes hands, often for higher and higher values ... At the moment the artist gets nothing for that changing of hands, greater value or if the artist sadly deceases the next of kin don't get a look in for the increasing value of the work . . . ' " Rest of story here.

Just came upon a terrific Columbia Law Review article by Naomi Mezey:

The Paradoxes of Cultural Property (CLR 107.8, 2007, pp. 2000-2046)

Abstract: Many current cultural disputes sound in the legal language and logic of discrimination or hate speech. The focus of this Essay is on the claims made explicitly or implicitly on the basis of cultural property. The problem with using ideas of cultural property to resolve cultural disputes is that cultural property encourages an anemic theory of culture so that it can make sense as a form of property. Cultural property is a paradox because it places special value and legal protection on cultural products and artifacts but does so based on a sanitized and domesticated view of cultural production and identity. Within the logic of cultural property, each group possesses and controls—or ought to control—its own culture. This view of cultural property suggests a preservationist stance toward culture. This Essay argues against both of these assumptions and for a view of culture that takes account of its dynamisms, appropriations, hybridizations, and contaminations. As a corrective to the paradoxes of cultural property, this Essay offers a counternarrative of cultural fusion and hybridity. These themes are illustrated with an extended example of the regulation of Native American mascots generally and the invention of one such mascot— Chief Illiniwek—specifically.

The full article can be downloaded here. Definitely worth a close reading. 24 March 2008

Publications that you may have missed:
--A special issue of World Development (vol. 35, no. 9, 2007) entitled "Property Rights, Collective Action, and Local Conservation of Genetic Resources." Apparently available only by subscription.
--Barry Barclay's book Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights (2006), reviewed here by David Delgado Shorter.