Abstract:

The past decade has witnessed a breath-taking increase in demands and proposals for the protection of indigenous peoples' knowledge systems from commercial "piracy," usually attributed to large Western pharmaceutical corporations. It is widely agreed that mainstream intellectual property tools such as patent, copyright, trademark, geo graphical names, and trade secrets may be tactically useful but are inadequate to capture all of the cultural and economic significance of local ecological, agricultural, or medical knowledge to indigenous communities, or to ensure the perpetuation of local knowledge systems as living, creative, and scientific disciplines. The philosophical and practical legal dimensions of this issue have been explored exhaustively by academics and activists and are under study by a number of international standard-setting bodies in the fields of environment, development, and human rights.