ABSTRACT
This chapter examines legal issues and principles touching on access to and control of Indigenous knowledge, and specifically the intersections of Indigenous peoples’ knowledge protection regimes with domestic enacted copyright laws, jurisprudence, and treaties. Indigenous knowledge and governance are both local and global: Individual communities may create and hold knowledge, as may individual members of those communities, and the conceptualizations of rights and permissions will be specific to each community. At the same time, communities of people are Indigenous to lands worldwide, within many domestic legal jurisdictions which also may govern. This chapter also explores how the intersections, and even tensions, between Indigenous knowledge protection regimes globally and the laws of those domestic legal jurisdictions can be evaluated through a lens of the legal principles of conflicts of laws. Rather than asserting efforts to merge the legal systems, an ethical approach calls for the situation to be framed in a way that recognizes equally valid legal systems that conflict. The use of forward-looking and respectful strategies can bridge and reconcile the conflicts and enable research and use of knowledge in lawful and respectful ways.
