Sacred but Vulnerable: A Critical Examination of the Adequacy of the Current Legal Framework for Protection of Tribal Sacred Traditional Knowledge

Sacred but Vulnerable: A Critical Examination of the Adequacy of the Current Legal Framework for Protection of Tribal Sacred Traditional Knowledge

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Volume 1 Issue 1 ()

Western intellectual property laws have come to dominate the global landscape in the age of commodification of information. The rights of indigenous persons and the sanctity of their traditions is one of the biggest casualties of granting proprietary rights to individual creators as envisaged by the current intellectual property regime. In article, we, shall attempt to explain the concept of sacred traditional knowledge through the prism of cultural relativism, emphasize the need for their protection, highlight the inadequacy of the current intellectual property regime so far as protection of these rights are concerned and explore the alternative approaches for affording protection to such knowledge. It is clarified that we do not provide any concrete working model for protection of such knowledge but only put forth the need to develop a sui generis system that would not confine itself to either the property rights or the commons approach and would integrate and amalgamate features from both whereby the community rights of indigenous persons and the knowledge that they hold dear and sacred will be recognized, revered and protected
Cite as: Prakruthi P. Gowda & Ushashi Khan, Sacred but Vulnerable: A Critical Examination of the Adequacy of the Current Legal Framework for Protection of Tribal Sacred Traditional Knowledge, 1 NUJS L. Rev. 109 (2008)