Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage | Theory, Practice, Policy, Ethics

Welcome

Welcome to the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage home page. This project represents an international, interdisciplinary collaboration among more than 50 scholars and 25 partnering organizations embarking on an unprecedented and timely investigation of intellectual property (IP) issues in cultural heritage that represent emergent local and global interpretations of culture, rights, and knowledge. Our objectives are:

to document the diversity of principles, interpretations, and actions arising in response to IP issues in cultural heritage worldwide;
to analyze the many implications of these situations;
to generate more robust theoretical understandings as well as exemplars of good practice; and
to make these findings available to stakeholders—from Aboriginal communities to professional organizations to government agencies—to develop and refine their own theories, principles, policies and practices.

We invite you to explore our website and to keep track of this project as it develops.

Patricia Goff

Dr. Patricia Goff’s current SSHRC-funded research explores the political economy of traditional knowledge. Patricia, an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, will find opportunities for synergism when she joins us as an IPinCH Associate Scholar. Her valuable perspectives as a political scientist will be a welcome contribution to our interdisciplinary project. Patricia’s research scope is worldwide; her overarching interest is in the challenges international organizations face in accommodating the cultural diversity of their stakeholders. She is currently studying the work of WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore. She will bring this experience and knowledge to IPinCH, contributing to its Knowledge Base, and joining the Customary, Conventional and Vernacular Legal Forms Working Group. Patricia is currently executive director of the Academic Council on the United Nations System and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. She is the author of Limits to Liberation: Local Culture in a Global Marketplace (2007), and co-editor of Irrelevant or Indispensable? The United Nations in the 21^st Century (2005) as well as Identity and Global Politics: Theoretical and Empirical Elaborations (2004).