[p2p-research] Fwd: Introducing a biocultural approach towards Traditional Knowledge Commons licensing

[Michel Bauwens]

I find it's related to dmytri kleiner's copyfarleft proposal:

Introducing a biocultural approach towards Traditional Knowledge Commons
licensing <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=8238>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
18th April 2010

 “In August 2009, around 80 traditional healers living in the Bushbuckridge
area of the Mpumalanga province in South Africa developed *a biocultural
community protocol* which provided clear terms and conditions for access to
their collectively held traditional knowledge (TK).”

*Report: Imagining a Traditional Knowledge
Commons<http://www.idlo.int/publications/TraditionalKnowledge.pdf>.
A community approach to sharing traditional knowledge for non-commercial
research. IDLO, 2009. By Elan Abrell et al.*

*Excerpts from this very innovative report:*

*Introducing the biocultural approach*

*The term ‘Bioculture’ implies ways of being and knowing of communities
whose way of life is based on a deep sense of kinship with the land, the
plants and animals. [1]*

*A Biocultural Community Protocol is a protocol that is developed as a
result of a consultative process within a community that outlines the
community’s core cultural and spiritual values and customary laws relating
to their traditional knowledge and resources based on which the community
provides clear terms and conditions under which access to their knowledge
and resources shall be provided. [2]*

*Biospiritual Virtues are virtues at the heart of the spirituality of
biocultural communities and form the ethical foundation of customary laws
and cultural practices of these communities. [3]*

*Unlike liberal conceptions of rights that emanate from a conceptualization
of the individual as the fundamental agent of social activity, a biocultural
approach to rights takes as its primary focus the community and the myriad
relationships that bind it together.*

*In a biocultural context, however, in which TK rather than private property
is one of the primary agents mediating human relations, the biospiritual
virtues that determine a TK user’s responsibilities to the community and the
ecosystem provide the basis for a somewhat different rights perspective that
focuses on communal ties as well as the individuals that share them.*

*These communities perceive their knowledge as an outcome of virtuous
relationships with the land, the plants and animals. Knowledge in these
communities is not seen as property that can be owned and sold as a
disembodied commodity but rather the very flow of knowledge affirms
biocultural relationships within communities and between communities and
their ecosystems.*

*Knowledge is not purely material but simultaneously cultural and spiritual
and its movement and application promotes a kind of virtuous cohesiveness.*

*Amongst biocultural communities, the movement of knowledge does not
generate profits as in the sale of commodities. On the contrary the
knowledge itself increases by creating a continually widening community of
knowledge holders all of who are bound by the code that insists that they do
not profit from what they have received freely. Whereas in a transaction of
the sale of knowledge, the profit remains with the seller, within
biocultural communities, the increase follows the knowledge while
simultaneously affirming cultural and spiritual bonds within communities.*

*While biocultural communities, be they healers or pastoralists, do engage
in transactions where they are compensated in money or in kind in exchange
for their knowledge, the nature of TK is such that it places a clear limit
on the extent to which the knowledge can be commodified.*

*Because when knowledge that emerges from certain cultural and spiritual
relationships is commodified it results in an erosion of a value system that
creates such knowledge and frays the ties that hold the community together.
Some of the healers believe that it even affects the efficacy of the
knowledge since it separates the healer from the community by restricting
their interaction to a material relationship mediated by the commodity. The
movement of knowledge as a relationship on the other hand blurs the
boundaries between the self and others strengthening cultural and spiritual
bonds that makes for a community.*

*The healers see a large part of healing as involving a spiritual reaching
out to the ailing, which is adversely affected if the entire relationship is
based on a pure commercial transaction.”*

*The TK Commons*

*“The question that confronts us now is whether the notion of community can
be expanded to include non-traditional users who would be willing to use TK
in accordance with the biospiritual virtues of the community and be willing
to freely share any increase of knowledge that arises from its use with the
community.*

*The expanded notion of community that includes non-traditional users who
are willing to allow their use of TK to be regulated by the biospiritual
virtues of the community providing such knowledge is the TK Commons.*

*The TK Commons is a widening circle that goes beyond .. direct reciprocity.
*

*Whereas reciprocity involves a relationship of two, a circle requires the
continued movement and growth of knowledge that benefits not just the
original community that provided the knowledge but other communities too.
While the benefits are indirect, the members of a TK Commons benefit not
just from the increase in their knowledge but also from the knowledge of
others who are a part of the Commons.*

*The creation of a TK Commons would require a community of TK holders to
develop in accordance with their biospiritual virtues the terms and
conditions for non-commercial access to their TK. These terms and conditions
would be in the form a license that would need to be complied with by
non-commercial users of TK such as students, non-profits, academic
researchers and archivists.*

*The general characteristics of the licenses (Traditional Knowledge Commons
License) could include:*

*a) The use of the knowledge takes place only on the terms of the license.
Any person using the knowledge is therefore taken to have agreed to be bound
by the license. The license sets out not general permission to use the
knowledge but how knowledge can be used, what obligations a user incurs to
respect the spiritual and cultural values of the knowledge bearing
community. The licensee will not appropriate or profit from any new
development based on the TK by restricting further access to such new
development or requiring payment for it, but will instead place these new
developments back into the TK Commons, usually by placing it under the same
license.*

*b) TK shall be used in a manner that is not inconsistent with the stated
terms and conditions in the license.*

*c) Any subsequent non-commercial users of the TK or developments based on
it who access it from the licensee will also have to comply with the terms
of the license.*

*d) All licensees must provide enduring recognition of the source of the TK.
*

*e) Any change in licensed use of the TK would require explicit permission
from the holders of the TK.*

*f ) The licensee will not use the TK in any manner that would cause harm to
the environment*

*g) The license requires that subsequent users of the knowledge comply with
the license*

*Researchers who engage directly with TK communities would need to take on
greater responsibilities to the community in terms of non-monetary benefit
sharing than others who make use of the knowledge, as it is mediated through
the primary researchers. Primary researchers would therefore need research
licenses which impose a broader range of requirements on them, one of which
is that the various research outputs must be licensed under traditional
knowledge commons licenses. A research license would be issued to an
individual researcher on personal application by that researcher, while a
traditional knowledge commons license would operate in the same manner as a
free software license, by accompanying the encoded knowledge resources and
applies to everyone who uses the resource. Both types of licenses would
conform to the general characteristics listed above.*

*Conclusion*

*“A TK Commons allows communities to share their traditional knowlegde
whilst being able to equally define and control its use. It provides
communities with an opportunity to globalize their biospiritual virtues that
are at the heart of their way of life and have ensured conservation of
biological diversity. It offers a possibility for communities to ensure
their knowledge isn’t disembodied by widening the understanding of
‘community’ to include all non-commercial users who agree to abide by the
biospiritual virtues that underlie the use of TK.*

*TK Commons ultimately seeks to view the knowledge of indigenous and local
communities as a total social phenomenon that moves beyond understanding TK
as a purely tradable commodity to promoting the cultural and spiritual
dimensions of TK that underlie a biocultural way of life. In the process,
the TK Commons would provide a medium through which an indigenous view of
rights as inextricably joined to biospiritual virtues and reciprocal
responsibilities can be incorporated into the larger international human
rights framework. Rather than merely relying on the generations of rights
that have already been formulated, ILCs could actively participate through
the TK Commons in the ongoing process of shaping the evolving framework of
international human rights. The TK Commons would thus enable ILCs to build
on previous generations of rights with new articulations of biocultural
rights that recognize the complex, interdependent relationship of
ecosystems, human communities and the cohesive flows of knowledge that bind
and shape them. It provides the possibility of a participatory system of
rights guided and supported as much by appreciation of community bonds and
biospiritual virtues as it is by legal mandate and market processes, an
expanded community through, which we can all participate and, in Neruda’s
words, widen “the boundaries of our being” through our experience of “the
affection that comes from those whom we do not know.”*


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
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