Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke Libraries has a blog-post titled “Can we protect ‘traditional knowledge?’ Should we?” that takes up some of the issues discussed on this blog by Dorothy Noyes in her post on how traditional culture works. Smith especially deals with Ghana’s new copyright act (mentioned on our blog here) that seeks to prevent the illicit use of folklore:
In much of the world, the possibility of providing protection for traditional knowledge — indigenous music, stories, dances and even genetic material — is a very lively topic. Even though such protections are a form of intellectual property right that clearly impacts issues of scholarship and copyright, I have not previously dealt with these discussions in this space. That is largely because of the great uncertainty I feel about the whole issue of whether such protections are appropriate and what form they should take.
The mismatch between traditional knowledge and IP regimes has also been discussed in a recent article by Catherine Saez on IP Watch in relation to ARIPO’s “Swakopmund Protocol on the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Folklore” (PDF).
Hat tip to Jason Baird Jackson.