Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage | Theory, Practice, Policy, Ethics

MailChimp now delivering the new IPinCH Digest

The IPinCH Digest, our monthy news service for team members, partners, students, and Associates, has been completely redesigned by Associate Kristen Dobbin, and recently sent out to the team.

IPinCH at "Ritual Spaces and Places" Workshop, Vancouver

IPinCH Director George Nicholas speaking on “Intangible heritage and intellectual property considerations of sacred places and secret knowledge.” Photo: Russell Clark.

IPinCH at "Ritual Spaces and Places" Workshop, Vancouver

Cultural Tourism Working Group co-chair Dave Schaepe sharing archaeological examples of Stó:lō ritualization of practice and customary law. Photo: Russell Clark.

"Transforming Colonial Categories?" Workshop at York University

The Working Group on Customary, Convention and Vernacular Legal Forms hosted the “Transforming Colonial Categories? Customary Law, Legal Pluralism and the Cultural Heritage of Indigenous Peoples” Workshop, January 27-29.

Scenes from the IPinCH Midterm Conference

Isobelle Campbell (Mannum Aboriginal Community Association) and Amy Roberts (Flinders University) provide an overview of the Ngaut Ngaut Interpretive Project Case Study in South Australia, which they co-direct.

SSHRC Passes IPinCH on Midterm Review!

At the midterm conference, our cherished Anishinabe elder Sydney Martin said, "This project has a spirit, IPinCH has a lifeforce.” Such sentiments helped to propel this project through our midterm review process and now on through 2015.

Welcome

Welcome to the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage home page. This project represents an international, interdisciplinary collaboration among more than 50 scholars and 25 partnering organizations embarking on an unprecedented and timely investigation of intellectual property (IP) issues in cultural heritage that represent emergent local and global interpretations of culture, rights, and knowledge. Our objectives are:

to document the diversity of principles, interpretations, and actions arising in response to IP issues in cultural heritage worldwide;
to analyze the many implications of these situations;
to generate more robust theoretical understandings as well as exemplars of good practice; and
to make these findings available to stakeholders—from Aboriginal communities to professional organizations to government agencies—to develop and refine their own theories, principles, policies and practices.

We invite you to explore our website and to keep track of this project as it develops.

"Inuvialuit Living History" Website Goes Live!

The Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre (ICRC) in Inuvik, N.W.T., is proud to announce the launch of a new website, Inuvialuit Pitqusiit Inuuniarutait: Inuvialuit Living History. Produced in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution's Arctic Studies Center, the Department of Canadian Heritage's Museums Assistance Program, Parks Canada’s Western Arctic Field Unit, and other project partners (see full list below), the website provides on-line access to an important but little-known collection of over 300 cultural objects and nearly 5,000 natural history specimens at the Smithsonian Institution which were collected by Hudson’s Bay trader Roderick MacFarlane from Inuvialuit living in the Anderson River area in the 1860s. It also provides lesson plans for elementary and high school students that highlight Inuvialuit traditional knowledge and the history of the Anderson River region as pathways for learning about items in the collection.

The project began in 2009 when a group of Inuvialuit elders, traditional knowledge experts, anthropologists and educators travelled to Washington to examine the collection. The trip launched a much broader program of outreach with Inuvialuit youth, elders, and community members in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR), and led to the generation of new knowledge about the MacFarlane Collection. The Inuvialuit Pitqusiit Inuuniarutait: Inuvialuit Living History website incorporates the ideas and information provided by Inuvialuit, and it invites people to provide their own knowledge of items in the collection. Through ongoing updates and additions to the website, the ICRC is confident that it will have an enduring life in Inuvialuit communities. According to ICRC Manager Catherine Cockney, “This project brought back to life a remarkable collection of traditional Inuvialuit artifacts and allows the Inuvialuit to connect their old material culture to the present”.

www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.caMore »

New Working Group Launches: Guide to Community-Based Cultural Heritage Research (CBCHR)

As another follow-up to the Midterm Conference and IPinCH commitments to producing practical, plain-language research products, the Steering Committee has added the CBCHR GUIDE to the list of project Working Groups. The Community-Based Cultural Heritage Research (CBCHR) co-chairs Kelly Bannister, Julie Hollowell, and John R. Welch are serving as facilitators/compilers/editors.

Envisioned as a way to engage with and learn from the ongoing surge of writing on the principles and practices of community-based research (CBR), this working group is dedicated to gathering, creating, and making available guidance tailored to fieldwork or research that deals with cultural heritage issues. People pursuing community-based research need background information and access to questions and case studies to help them think through the implications of their research overall and at each step of the research process.

The GUIDE is conceived as a multi-authored constellation of contributions that will be assembled into a book of practical guidance, not an academic volume. Toward this end, the CBCHR Working Group will facilitate open collaborations among the IPinCH collective, with others invited to contribute to fill gaps and expand horizons. The initial stages, which were put into motion at the midterm conference, involve (1) obtaining feedback on what CBCH researchers would find useful, (2) identifying contributors, and (3) drafting content that can evolve “wikipedia style” using an internal online platform before being made public. There is the potential of more than one end product, including online guides and print volumes aimed at specific user groups (e.g., academic researchers, communities involved in research).

All IPinCH team members and others interested in creating or sharing practical guidance for community-based research on or relating to cultural heritage are encouraged to join this WG or otherwise participate.More »

Introducing Our New IPinCH Project Coordinator

The IPinCH Steering Committee is pleased to introduce our new Project Coordinator, Dr. Brian Egan.

Brian has more than two decades of experience working on land, natural resource, and environmental issues, primarily in Canada but also with some professional and volunteer experience in Latin America. Trained in both the natural and social sciences, Brian’s career has spanned a broad range of positions, including field ecologist, environmental consultant, research associate, policy analyst, and field operations supervisor. He has also worked in a diversity of settings, including in the non-profit and advocacy sector, in consulting and government, and in research and teaching capacities in post-secondary institutions.

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Traditional Knowledge Licensing and Labeling Website 1.0: localcontexts.org —Jane Anderson and Kim Christen

Indigenous people are under-served by both traditional all-rights-reserved copyright and Creative Commons licenses because they do not account for: the second and third party ownership of this material; the cultural protocols and access restrictions that govern access to material within Indigenous contexts; the fact that a significant amount of Indigenous cultural material is already in the public domain and also inevitably circulating in the digital domain; that Indigenous communities are wanting to share certain material whilst also making users aware of the appropriate codes of conduct for access, use and future circulation of that material. There is an urgent need to develop a set of specific licenses and labels that can recognize the special status that Indigenous cultural material has and the legitimacy of already existing and developing Indigenous knowledge control strategies.

The Traditional Knowledge Licensing and Labeling Website 1.0 is a project for the development of an accessible digital platform that will contain a set of standardized licenses and fair-use labels that can be applied to already existing and future generated content that contains community-recognized traditional and Indigenous knowledge. Funding for this project is provided by IPinCH.

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Spotlight: Using Videos to Explore IP Issues

Images, moving or still, have often been a cause for concern by descendant communities regarding their intangible heritage, which has often been viewed as part of the public domain. Yet videos are today an effective tool that can be used to increase public awareness of what actually consitutes intellectual property and how and why inappropriate use of objects, images, and information can cause cultural and economic harm.

A small number of videos have now been produced by IPinCH team members and partnering communities, and more are expected to flow from the earlier distribution of Flipcams to our Case Study team and others. We are promoting these films in a new section of our website, with the hope of stimulating more interest in the medium by our team members, and in the messages they convey by the public.

We now offer three informative videos, each reflecting very different styles of presentation: “IP Concerns and the 2010 Olympics” with Ashley Julian and Brian Noble, “A Case of Access,” by the Inuvialuit Case Study team; and “Oral Tradition into Written Tradition” by Barbara Winter and Tanys Norcott, which focuses on Indonesian Shadow Puppets and features IPinCH Director George Nicholas (double click to view). More coming soon to an IPinCH Theatre near you.
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IPinCH News

IPinCH team member Emma Feltes wins Dalhousie University's Governor General gold medal.

IPinCH team member Emma Feltes has been awarded Dalhousie University's Governor General gold medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences for her work on the Laurier Memorial, a letter that sets out a vision for just relations between Indigenous Peoples and Canada that was&

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"Inuvialuit Living History" Website Goes Live!

www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.caMore »

Northwest Coast Argillite, Intellectual Property, and Haida Heritage Exhibition

On March 22 the Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Simon Fraser University opened a second exhibit that explores themes in intellectual property and cultural heritage. The first, “Andean Icons” (November 2011 to March 2012), focused on the production of replicas of Peruvian ceramics and the exploitation of indigenous iconography. The second exhibit, “Haida Stories in Stone,” opened in late March and will run until October 2012. This exhibit features 61 pieces of Haida argillite, carved between 1900 and 1980.More »