Indigenous knowledge systems and intellectual property laws in South Africa

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the current status of indigenous intellectual property rights \nprotection in South Africa. The current intellectual property laws and legislations in South Africa do \nnot fully protect indigenous knowledge systems and in some instances the indigenous knowledge \nis misappropriated, abused without proper recognition and acknowledgement of the custodian of \nthis knowledge. The thesis suggests that in order for us to fully understand the developments of \nintellectual property in South Africa, we need to look at similar developments in the United States \nand Australia. Using conceptual tools dealing with post-colonial, contested culture and legal \ntheories such as the natural-law and the economic model, the thesis tries to analyse the current \npredicament, in the light of the research main question: how can one possibly marry indigenous \nproperty rights and the western legal frameworks in a practical and ethical way?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.