0.9 Activism  (Page 7/11)

The effort to solidify the enforceability of click-wrap licenses throughout the nation had failed.

Case study #3: copyright law and folklore

Seeking greater protection for traditional knowledge

As we saw in  Module 8 , many indigenous groups view cultural knowledge and ancient expressions in myths and artwork to be collectively owned and safeguarded. They have sought strengthened intellectual property rights for TCEs and other forms of traditional knowledge at both the international and national levels. Their major grievances are absence of sufficient remuneration for commercial use of indigenous expressions, widespread disregard for indigenous communal rights, misrepresentation of sacred indigenous cultural elements, and unauthorized publication of sensitive information and folklore.

Mobilization of indigenous communities

Wipo’s 1998-1999 fact finding missions

The United Nation's World Intellectual Property Organization reacted to the growing pressure from indigenous groups -- and from the national governments of the countries in which those groups were located -- by designing nine fact-finding missions covering twenty eight countries to determine the expectations and IP needs of the groups. Indigenous representatives informed WIPO officials about the obstacles to protecting their local intellectual property practices, the difficulty of documenting sacred elements of their cultures, and their struggles to curb misappropriation of indigenous expressions by American entertainment industries.

WIPO collated the respondents' assessments of specific national regimes and published a  report . Some respondents favored national public royalty systems for the appropriation of indigenous cultures. Others disapproved of any system for selling access to folklore. Some favored government documentation of indigenous folklore, but others felt that that would facilitate misappropriation by providing a convenient catalog for companies seeking new cultural symbols to commoditize.

WIPO also collected local perspectives on how best to organize indigenous populations around intellectual property reform. Some suggested that local customary norms would have to adopt some of the principles of copyright law in order to take advantage of copyright protection. Others called for education/awareness programs, stronger restrictions on public access to their folklore, collective drafting of regional model laws, public funds for legal aid, or more prolonged efforts to clarify existing legal rights for indigenous communities.

Set forth below is a collection of indigenous declarations defining and seeking protection for traditional knowledge.

The mataatua declaration, new zealand, 1993

One of the most notable expressions of these grievances was the  Mataatua Declaration on Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples , forged after a conference in June of 1993. The conference was hosted by the nine tribes of Mataatua in New Zealand. Over 150 delegates from fourteen countries attended.