Indigenous intellectual property is an umbrella legal term used in national and international forums to identify indigenous peoples' special rights to claim (from within their own laws) all that their indigenous groups know now, have known, or will know.
It is a concept that has developed out of a predominantly western legal tradition, and has most recently been promoted by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, as part of a more general United Nations push to see the diverse wealth of this world's indigenous, intangible cultural heritage better valued and better protected against perceived, ongoing misappropriation and misuse.
Nation states across the world have difficulties reconciling locally indigenous traditions, laws and cultural norms with predominantly western legal systems, effectively leaving indigenous peoples' individual and communal intellectual property rights largely unprotected.
Read more about Indigenous Intellectual Property: Declarations Regarding Indigenous Intellectual Property, United Nations Declaration On The Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Famous quotes containing the words indigenous, intellectual and/or property:
“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When “reality” is sought for at large, it is without intellectual import; at most the term carries the connotation of an agreeable emotional state.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic, also.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)