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College and Research Libraries
January 1997, Vol. 58, No. 1
Book Review
Valuing Local Knowledge: Indigenous People and Intellectual Property Rights. Eds. Stephen B. Brush and Doreen Stabinsky. Washington, D.C.: Island Pr., 1996. 337p. $50 cloth (ISBN 1- 55963-378-6); $30 paper (ISBN 1-55963-379-4). LC 95-38484.
How are intellectual property rights, indigenous knowledge, and biological diversity related, both philosophically and economically? This collection of essays, developed from a conference at Lake Tahoe in 1993 on intellectual property rights and indigenous knowledge, provides an excellent entree into the breadth and complexities of the issues surrounding these ideas. For those of us overwhelmed with the extension of copyright issues into the electronic realm, this volume will help to put that part of the problem into proper perspective as these authors deal with issues raised by collective rather than individual knowledge.
The immediate background to this volume is the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity which was signed with much fanfare at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 (not by the United States, which waited until Earth Day) to take effect in December 1993. Implementation, however, was left to individual nations and courts of international law. A potentially incompatible agreement, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, was signed in December 1993 in Uruguay at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) talks. The Society for Applied Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association, organized the Lake Tahoe conference, which was sponsored by the Ethics and Values Studies Program of the National Science Foundation and held in October 1993.
The resulting fifteen papers by a broad cross section of involved players, from academicians to entrepreneurs to governmental representatives, have been organized into three parts preceded by an introductory chapter, "Whose Knowledge, Whose Genes, Whose Rights," which sets the tone and defines the terms. Part I, "Equity and Indigenous Rights," includes six chapters that explore the varied philosophical issues concerning the possible extension of the Western/Northern concept of intellectual property rights to knowledge of biological resources. In Part II, "Conservation, Knowledge, Property," the authors address ongoing efforts by specific, primarily private, organizations (e.g., Shaman Pharmaceuticals Inc., Native Seeds/SEARCH) to implement the spirit of the Biodiversity Convention; five excellent case studies from different parts of the world are presented. The volume concludes with three chapters on "Policy Options and Alternatives," which address specific legal avenues that are being pursued by such entities as the National Cancer Institute and the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups Program (funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health), the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
This very valuable collection of papers serves to broaden the discussion of intellectual property rights to a truly international level and to place it firmly within the framework of the growing indigenous rights movement. These discussions bring a very useful international perspective to the issues of copyright and patent as we encounter them in our electronic information world, which is primarily Western and Northern in outlook and tradition—Joan Berman, Humboldt State University, Arcata, California.
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