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Traditional Knowledge And Intellectual Property Rights In Australia And Southeast Asia, Christoph Antons

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

This paper will present a short survey of various approaches to traditional knowledge and folklore protection in Australia and Southeast Asia. It seems that both the terminology used in the debate about traditional knowledge and folklore and the legal solutions envisaged are very diverse. Over the last decade there has been an explosion of international declarations and organisations advocating internationally harmonised notions of rights to culture, often on behalf of indigenous minorities or other local communities. This often leads to what Cowan, Dembour and Wilson2 have called “strategic essentialism”. The term refers to the attempts by activists from or working …