Indigenous Peoples' Rights at the Intersection of Human Rights and Intellectual Property Rights

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review
Vol. 18, No. 2 (2014), pp. 262-295

Exploration of the interface between human rights (HRs) and intellectual property rights (IPRs) is a venture still at a gestational stage. One of the major challenges of that initiative is how to map indigenous peoples’ rights into the discourse. Indigenous peoples’ rights pose significant challenges to both HRs and IPRs jurisprudence. Not only is there a clarity gap over indigenous peoples’ rights in the international bill of rights. Indigenous people’s rights are analogous misfits to any head of conventional HRs as well as conventional IPRs. Overall, indigenous people’s rights are a source of irritation to both HRs and IPRs. The HRs-IPRs interface help to unveil the root of indigenous peoples’ disadvantages in both legal domains as outliers in regard to western legal traditions. As such, the contemporary interests in HRs’ interface with IPRs present new opportunity to re-engage the subject of indigenous peoples’ rights and to measure the progress of both HRs and IPRs in regard to indigenous peoples as the most vulnerable members of the human family.

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