United Nations Radio

PRES: Many of the valuable commodities developed and exchanged around the world are intellectual property. Intellectual property laws encourage innovation by rewarding inventors. But as UN Radio's Nick Baker reports, the way copyright law is set up now -- it does not sufficiently protect traditional knowledge systems.

NARR: The traditional knowledge and customs of indigenous people across the world are in danger of being stolen and misused by the corporate sector, according to a leading academic. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, a senior researcher at the United Nations University, said that the intellectual property of indigenous people should receive much more protection under national and international law.

Rishab Aiyer Ghost

Ghosh: One example is about collective communal copyright for textile patterns in Ghana. So there is a lot of African, sort of pseudo-African patterns that are on textiles books, printings, all over the place, which you can buy at any store, but what people don't realize is that they weren't invented by whoever's printing this piece of paper, these are actually patterns that have been invented, these are patterns that have been created by traditional textile-creating communities.

NARR: Mr Ghosh said that although some countries did have laws to protect the intellectual property of their indigenous people, these were irrelevant outside national borders.

Ghosh: In Ghana they actually have a form of copyright which recognizes the community's invention of these things. It's not really recognized anywhere else, so it doesn't actually help them. There's no real incentive structure for say, American sellers of bed sheets to bother to lobby for these rights to be created. The communities in Ghana certainly are powerless to do it.

NARR: He said the issue is an inherently complex one, as the idea of ownership itself has many different meanings across indigenous cultures.

Ghosh: One lumps everything together in terms of traditional knowledge, but if you look at Papua New Guinea and concepts of image dreams that they have, that people actually own certain types of images, or you look at the guild system or you look at traditional musical patterns among classical music drummers in India, tabla players in India, or whatever, now traditional knowledge ranges from notion of communal things, which nobody owns, but there are also traditional knowledge systems, which are more like trademarks or trade secrets, because it's assumed that you keep things secrets, you only share them with initiates, you only share them with members of the guild, you only share these forms of knowledge with the people who have the right to know these things. So there's a whole complex set of knowledge-sharing mechanisms that are all lumped together under traditional knowledge.

NARR: Nick Baker for UN Radio.

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