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- Last week’s General Assembly of WIPO had a segment on the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Cultural Expressions (the IGC). In a move to heighten the transparency of negotiations, WIPO made available a webcast of the assembly and published the recordings on its website. The segment on the IGC took place in the first part of the morning session on friday and starts at approximately five minutes into the video (first part and second part). There is, however, no interpretation in the recorded version of the statements.
- Mohan Dewan, patent and trade mark attorney and litigator, has an article on IPRs and traditional knowledge in India titled “The Realities Of Traditional Knowledge And Patents” on IP Watch: “In India, laws acknowledge the fact that traditional knowledge cannot be protected by intellectual property rights and that if documented the knowledge would be lost by the communities to which it belongs through expropriation. Putting the laws into reality reveals some interesting – and sometimes painful – lessons.”
- From the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Working Paper series, a paper by Derek Fincham on the relation between the concepts of property and heritage from a legal perspective: “The Distinctiveness of Property and Heritage.” For an anthropological view on this, see Regina Bendix 2009: “Inheritances: Possession, Ownership and Responsibility” in the journal Traditiones (Ljubljana) 38(2) – unfortunately not online.
- The current issue of Museum Anthropology (33/2), edited by Stephen E. Nash and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, focusses on NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), . The TOC is here.
- Related to this, Kim Alderman on “The Cultural Property and Archaeology Law Blog” writes on the Repatriation of Aboriginal Remains and Artifacts in Canada.