Media, Technology and Society

Intellectual Property Rights: An Ethical Cultural Policy for Indigenous Societies?

Finally, after eight, well almost nine months of agonizing tedium rewarding work, my honours thesis is complete. Weighing in at 82 pages, 32,000 words, though, its essentially an MA thesis. I hadn't set out originally to write something so large. 30 pages would have been sufficient, theoretically by departmental standards. For the subject matter, though, the space was required. So what is the subject? Well, as the title of this post might suggest, its about intellectual property rights (you know, patents and copyright...) and indigenous societies.

Initially, it was going to be about 'the nations of the south' AKA the developing world, and intellectual property rights, but the focus changed in the inevitable process of narrowing down and refining a topic.

I'm proud of the topic focus though. I think the developing world and its concerns, and especially those of indigenous peoples are forgotten in mainstream discourse, and even in academia. They're sort of like the forgotten casualty, or a remaining undigested fragment left in the wake of the technological modernity we're all involved in.

That's why it was quite a learning experience to look at these peoples and their concerns (admittedly, in an indirect way) through the completion of this research study.

Ultimately, the findings of the study can be broken down to the following.

One, that the adoption of Anglo European intellectual property rights as a preeminent global cultural policy has helped aggravate already existent problems between traditional peoples and the west. Essentially, the model of cultural production in the west (based on innovation, and individual incentives) is incompatible for peoples for whom spirituality, and communal responsibilities assume a higher priority.

In essence, this arises from the fact that western intellectual property rights were developed in the west, and never philosophically altered to take into account other cultures and belief systems.

Thus, policymakers hoping to fashion a cultural policy which takes into account the needs of indigenous peoples face a difficult situation: they often can't do away with Anglo European intellectual property rights altogether (owing to most nations' ratification of the Paris, Berne and TRIPs agreements), yet they need to accomodate indigenous peoples own legal systems as much as possible.

Thus, this study has further elaborated on a set of measures taken in progressive regions throughout the world to resolve this situation. These strategies are essentially Sui Generis in nature, meaning they are (usually) national attempts to say that indigenous cultural goods and services deserve special status within IP. For these measures to be effective, they would need to compensate for a deficiency in protection and jurisdiction within conventional intellectual property law.

Its a complex and complicated area of scholarly investigation, one at the intersection of many fields, including: Social Anthropoligy; Cultural Policy; Political Economy; Intellectual Property Rights.

Degree Perilously Close to Completion...!

So close I can feel it!

I just finished up my last official normal credit course (POL 335 - Government in China) a few days with a monstrous 30 page paper, made more monstrous by the fact that I had to rewrite a previously piddly entry because it just wasn't up to standard. Actually, I shouldn't even be complaining at all, because this last semester has been one of the easiest on record for me, far easier compared to engineering-esque 18 credit semesters! eeeugh, no thanks. A happy 12-15 credits is all I need.

The last thing I have to finish before I toss my hat up in the air is my honours thesis, which is bumbling along happily at this point as well. I just completed the presentation which went well. Now, all I need to do is 1 month of hard work, and I should be able to crank out a nice 40 page masterpeice. I've done it before, all I have to do is not let the ridiculous amount of time I have to complete it - 4 months - tempt me into procrastinating my way into a last minute crunch.

As I mentioned, the presentation went super well, the other presenters were also quite good - with one other female student investigating issues related to mine (Inuit Cultural Independence and Canadian Government Interventions...). The other interesting thing was how different all the topics were. From 'Disaster Communication and Vancouver's Downtown Eastside' - an interesting investigation of how local government is unprepared to perform the (relatively cheap) fortifications necessary to ameliorate issues of legal liability in the event of a catastrophic earthquake in the region.

Which reminds me, its kind of nice to know that one is sitting on a subduction zone (two overlapping tectonic plates), with a contintental shelf which might decide that it would prefer to move 2-3 metres to the left of all a sudden. Such an event would release a magnitude 9.0 (ish) richter scale earthquake of the likes that hit Anchorage Alaska in the 1960s, and terrorized Indonesia in late December of last year.

Other theses of note, 'Complex Human Disaster Mitigation and Africa' - investigating the Pan-African disaster mitigation structures and how they reacted (or didn't) to the Sudan/Darfur crisis. Fascinating stuff, and I would like to read that paper when its done.

But lest you think that all the School of Communications at Simon Fraser U. studies are Disasters, Media Democratization through NGOs, and an interesting Uses and Gratification study of Archie Comics rounded out the conference.

As my research on 'Intellectual Property Rights, Cultural Localization and the South' progresses, I shall make intermittent updates, because I am sure - someone out there would be interested to read about it. That's the fascinating thing about the internet. So many people and issues are represented (however lightly) that most if not all topics are represented, and conversely, no matter how obscure the topic - someone is interested in it (if only academics).

While I was finishing up this last semester, a host of world events and posting ideas happened which I had neither the time nor the ability to post up, so I will hopefully be seeing to these in the next few days/weeks. In such a way, my blog continues to be defined by huge interludes of nothing, followed by explosions of content.