Rosemary Coombe - "Protecting Cultural Industries To Promote Cultural Diversity"

Protecting Cultural Industries To Promote Cultural Diversity: Dilemmas For International Policy-making Posed By The Recognition Of Traditional Knowledge."

Forthcoming in Keith Maskus and Jerome Reichman eds., International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology Under a Globaized Intellectual Property Regime (Cambridge University Press) 2005.

The protection of traditional environmental knowledge is a complex area of emerging law that has attracted a great deal of academic attention and controversy over the past five years. I will limit my remarks to the Americas and focus primarily on the empirical reasons that have been established for asserting such rights, the limits of the intellectual property model often proposed to accommodate them, the nature of the social movements in which they are asserted, and the larger difficulty of placing these rights within a human rights framework. Ultimately I will suggest that we understand claims to traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) in the Americas within a context informed by the social movements in which they are most forcefully expressed, where they draw upon human rights vocabularies and rhetorical forms but express much wider social and political aspirations that have emerged in response to conditions of neoliberal globalization.

Click here to download this whole document as a pdf file.