The first innovators: why is protecting indigenous rights so difficult?
How can IP support indigenous brands (both start-ups and mature) when it comes to innovation?
For indigenous and local communities one of the main values of IP rights is recognition. Beyond the protection and the security provided by IP rights, the recognition of the titularity of those knowledges, the visibility, and empowerment generated by the IP rights are key.
Usually, traditional knowledge (TK) was accessed from “outside” the communities, and the benefits and all the credit were taken by these external interventions, from researchers, private initiatives, and sometimes even the government agencies. Indigenous peoples' ability as creators, inventors, and guardians of that knowledge was invisible. For a lot of communities, legal recognition (as IP TK rights) is a revindication.
How are inventors among indigenous communities faring? How is their innovation being supported?
Recognition of IP rights for indigenous peoples, same as for other rights, is still a work in progress, a pending challenge.
For example, the way TK rights are approached from the IP perspective is as a collective right, so the idea of an individual as an inventor among indigenous communities is still something not usual. And that's a permanent challenge with the recognition of indigenous peoples’ collective rights because even the collective perspective is key for them, there is also the need for individualisation, at different levels.
TK related to natural resources is constantly changing, especially in the context of the climate crisis. An adaptation of the procedure to prepare and extract a specific plant generated in one local community can be developed for the “sabio” or “chaman” of the community, but if the approach comes as a collective right recognition, the recognition will go to the community, or maybe even the indigenous ethnic group.
That's why is important to strengthen our understanding of each indigenous people, each community, and their social/spiritual dynamics, with a more holistic approach, to try to be able to recognise the collective but also the individual aspects of TK.
In an interesting example in Brazil, a university is recognising indigenous “maestros”, individuals, “sabios” and “sabias” with the equivalent of a Doctoral degree (in Portuguese).
What are the common issues/barriers faced by indigenous communities, and what innovative solutions have you seen?
In general, one important challenge for indigenous people's TK is that the protection of their rights is fragmented in different institutions. The international legal framework, provides a series of “clusters” that are related to TK and then that is expected to be replicated at the national government level:
