ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a legal geography lens to interrogate an intersection of laws – where intellectual property laws meet with environmental (biodiversity) laws, and also Indigenous rights. Our chapter here builds upon several years of research relating to the issue of “biopiracy” (see Robinson 2010) and attempts to find preventative measures to help protect and promote Indigenous knowledge. We utilise and explain a specific methodology, patent landscaping, which examines the filings for legal rights of monopoly by patent-holders and inventors and provides a “map” or an array of the results. Our patent mapping is particularly interested in identifying trends in patenting “nature” – in other words, who is filing patents on extracts or uses of plants or animals. The results provide a snapshot of legal assemblages or “chronotopes”, which highlights claims over “innovations” and the rights allocated to them, which change temporally and spatially (Valverde 2015). We focus specifically on Vanuatu – a country which has a rich system of Kastom, which are traditions and rules that might otherwise be understood as “customary laws”. We highlight that some of the species being patented have existing customary law and where the patenting or monopolisation of uses of a plant species might be bio-culturally offensive and unjust.
