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:
“All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his lungs are sound, his spirits never flag.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock,—that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Man was born rich, or inevitably grows rich by the use of his faculties; by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual proposition.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)