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Recent Developments, Indigenous Cultural/Intellectual Property
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| Background information for students using this website, October 2007. |
| The International Journal of Cultural Property is now regularly carrying articles on indigenous IPR and is actively seeking innovative submissions on this and related topics. For additional information, browse the website of the International Cultural Property Society. |
 RSS feed for Who Owns Native Culture? website. |
| Some blogs to track if you're interested in indigenous IPR, heritage protection, and questions of open access: SavageMinds, the Museum Anthropology blog, Material World, and Kimberly Christen's Long Road. You might also want to check the web page of a project at Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada, called "Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage." This large, multi-year project has assembled a dream-team of IP and indigenous-rights experts who will be working together to advance thinking on these issues. The site is rather sparsely documented right now (April 2008) but should become more populated with documents as the project moves forward. |
News stories, articles, reports |
| Slashdot.com published a link to an interesting online lecture (60 min.+) by patent attorney Stephen Kinsella entitled "Rethinking Intellectual Property Completely." Parts of it are quite witty, and it raises interesting Lessig-esque questions about how (or whether!) we know that existing patent laws actually encourage innovation. 12 May 2008. |
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Salvia divinorum, an indigenous New World hallucinogen, has sparked the latest moral panic in the US. From Slate.com, 6 May 2008: "The normally staid Associated Press attached a headline to a March 11 story that inquired, "Is Salvia the Next Marijuana?" If the AP meant to ask whether Salvia divinorum is the next misunderstood recreational drug to be both demonized and popularized by the press, the answer is yes." (Rest of article) |
| Rebecca Adamson, "Indigenous Economics: Ancient Knowledge Inspires Economic Reform of Capital Markets," Cité Libre, Canada, 10 March 2008, posted 8 May 2008. |
| Via Kim Christen's blog Long Road, check out this story about and link to a video called Pirates of the Navajo Nation, accessible on YouTube, which apparently documents an effort by the Navajo Nation Council to pass a law prohibiting the production and sale of pirated CDs--presumably of Navajo music, although the goal isn't entirely clear. |
| Excerpt from James Cuno's Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton University Press, 2008). Wall Street Journal, 26 April 2008. |
| Brazil announces plan to control access to the Amazon to deter biopirates. BBC News, 26 April 2008. |
| "Australia stalls on indigenous copyright." The Age, 21 April 2008. |
| "Indigenous art sales stymied by heritage laws, say auction houses." The Age, Australia, 19 April 2008. |
| Scottish crofters are now petitioning to be considered an indigenous people of the British Isles. The Independent, 19 April 2008. |
| "New Technologies and the Protection and Promotion of Traditional Cultural Expressions," Mira Burri-Nenova, May 2007. Downloadable here. |
| The Island Institute of Alaska is sponsoring a symposium, "Gifts of Nature, Gifts of Culture: Who Owns the Commons?" in Sitka, June 18-22, 2008. |
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.
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| Kim Christen's blog has a brief comment on the repatriation of human remains and a link to a recent article in the Australian which contends that the display or retention of human remains in the world's museums is now in decline. To this I would add that retention of the remains of indigenous peoples is the focal point of the repatriation movement. Thousands of skeletons of Europeans, dating to the middle ages and earlier, remain in museum collections, mostly without controversy, although a few pagan groups have begun to demand repatriation and pagan reburial of the remains of pre-Christian communities. |
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 |
| So even Danes have cultural property complaints! Today's New York Times reports on the legacy of Sweden's military conquests, 11 March 2008. |
| From IP-Watch.org: (1) a streaming video interview of Debra Harry, Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism, and (2) a story about a recent meeting of indigenous representatives with WIPO's Intergovernmental Committee on Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, linked here on 11 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.
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| "Code bolsters Indigenous art protection." ABC (Australia), 15 February 2008, posted here 6 March 2008. |
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| Jacob Simet, "Respecting cultural protocol," The National (Papua New Guinea), 8 February 2008, posted 11 February 2008. |
| More on the Mukurtu Archive project from the ABC (Australia), 6 February 2008, posted here 11 February 2008. |
| If you like audio podcasts, be sure to go to BBC's Digital Planet for the interview of Kim Christen, who talks about the Mukurtu Archive project with which she's involved. You can also link to the interview through Kim's blog. The interview is dated 29 January, posted here 1 February 2008. |
| "Turning plants into pills in Kenya," by Tatum Anderson, SciDev.Net, 13 December 2007, posted here 31 January 2008. |
| More on ongoing controversy about a patent on wild rice, from the Ojibwe perspective: the article "Ricekeepers," by Winona LaDuke, originally published in Orion magazine in the July/August 2007 issue, linked here 15 January 2008. |
| An editorial in SciDev.Net argues that the world may have gone overboard in its campaign against biopiracy, creating legal tangles that slow legitimate research on biodiversity as well as ethically questionable bioprospecting. Dated 12 September 2007, posted here 15 January 2008. |
| The P2P Consortium recently featured an interview with Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, an anti-IPR group. 12 January 2008, posted here 15 January. |
| If you're interested in cultural hybridization and the difficulty of defining cultural boundaries, check out this story on the rise of Aboriginal hip-hop in Australia. 12 January 2008, posted here 15 January. |
| For state-of-the-art work in Aboriginally controlled archives, check out the newly launched Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive, still in beta but serviceable enough. From the site's information page: "The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive is a 'safe keeping place.' The archive uses the cultural protocols of the Warumungu people to arrange, sort, and present content. Any piece of content that is not marked "open" (and thus viewable by the general public) is tagged with a set of restrictions." Kudos to Kim Christen and her collaborators for bringing the rest of us into the future. 7 January 2008. |
| Dennis Ocholla, "Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge" (PDF file). International Review of Information Ethics, September 2007, posted here January 2008. |
| The New York Times ran a recent story on the bioprospector Chris Kilham. The Times piece includes a brief audio slide show that may not be accessible indefinitely. "Medicine hunter" or biopirate? You decide--although the Times article states that Kilham has helped to increase the household income of grateful maca farmers in remote areas of highland Peru. 1 January 2008; posted here 4 January. |
Many more archived stories about recent developments in Indigenous IP, 2003-2006, 2007- |
