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Antons, Christoph --- "Traditional Cultural Expressions and their Significance for Development in a Digital Environment: Examples from Australia and Southeast Asia" [2008] ELECD 333; in Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira (eds), "Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment

Editor(s): Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847209214

Section: Chapter 12

Section Title: Traditional Cultural Expressions and their Significance for Development in a Digital Environment: Examples from Australia and Southeast Asia

Author(s): Antons, Christoph

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

12. Traditional cultural expressions and
their significance for development in
a digital environment: examples from
Australia and Southeast Asia
Christoph Antons*

1. INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF DEFINING
"TRADITIONAL CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS" AND
"TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE"
While there are great expectations for traditional cultural expressions (TCE)
and their significance for development, at the international level there is still
little agreement as to how they are to be defined, the beneficiaries of potential
forms of protection delineated, cultural integrity simultaneously commer-
cialised and protected, and the benefits from increasing commercialisation
distributed. In her chapter, Miriam Sahlfeld points out some of these problems,
which are also identified in other chapters of this volume. In the following, I
will comment on these problem areas by using Sahlfeld's chapter as a point of
departure and reference point and by providing examples from my current
research focusing on Australia and Southeast Asia. First, there is the question,
discussed by Martin Girsberger earlier in this volume, of whether "traditional
cultural expressions" can be easily separated from what the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO) now defines as traditional knowledge (TK) "in
the strict sense". Terms referring to "tradition" are all somewhat problematic,
as will be outlined later in this chapter. Therefore, this debate appears as a
rather technical one conducted by intellectual property experts, on how to fit
the various categories of "tradition" into the relatively narrowly defined cate-
gories of intellectual property. In spite of such categorisation by intellectual
property experts, most of the literature dealing with TCE ­ ...