Indigenous Digital Cultural Heritage, Intellectual Property Rights and Indigenous Worldviews: Renewed Engagement as a Way Forward
摘要
Fundamental clashes between intellectual property rights (IPR) and Indigenous worldviews have led to several disruptions and cases of cultural misappropriation all over the globe. Even when important attempts to conciliate rights and needs for protection have been made, most of the efforts have focused on the perspective of exclusive rights. While Indigenous peoples have consistently expressed concerns over the lack of representation and respect of their own ethics and human rights within decision-making processes and laws governing their culture. Technological developments, especially digitalization, add to the challenge in protecting and accessing CH of Indigenous people responsibly. This chapter contextualizes these general challenges by presenting selected cases related to IPR and regulation of digital CH of Indigenous people from Mexico. First, the chapter elaborates on the challenge from a general perspective on IPR and Indigenous CH in the context of digitization. Second, it borrows examples of inspiration/misappropriation of digital CH of Indigenous people from Mexico to thereafter present Mexico’s recent legal developments in the context of cultural heritage regulation. Based on this analysis, the chapter argues that to reconcile IPR and Indigenous worldviews in the context of digital CH of Indigenous people, renewed engagement and collaboration are central. To this end, user-centric methods such as citizen science (CS) could hold great potential to serve policymaking initiatives and processes by providing evidence and useful insights to ensure compliance with legislation in a transparent and participatory manner, bringing in unheard voices and perspectives of Indigenous groups.