Cradle Principles on Knowledge Governance Released at World Intellectual Property Organization

Sean Flynn

The Cradle Principles on Knowledge Governance were released today at the 50th meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore at the World Intellectual Property Organization. The principles were drafted at a retreat with copyright academics, stakeholders and computational researchers who gathered in the Cradle of Humankind to address the goal of enabling African and other Global South uses of digital research tools without promoting “data colonialism” concerns.

The Cradle Principles express that knowledge governance systems but must be seen as composed of various fields of information regulation including “international, constitutional, traditional knowledge, intellectual property, media and telecommunications, privacy, competition, biodiversity, and other laws, and are also composed of non-governmental cultural practices and norms, including traditional systems governing the use of community-held knowledge.” The Principles conclude that such systems, taken together, should further the following goals:

-promote the goals of sustainable development, social justice, and human rights;

-provide balanced frameworks that protect and promote access to, and use of information for research, scientific inquiry, analysis, translation, and preservation of cultures and languages;

-promote the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples and local communities’ in the knowledge economy, including their right to self-determination, inclusion, cultural integrity, data sovereignty and sustainable development;

-ensure sovereignty over knowledge resources to combat unidirectional information resource extraction and misappropriation that aggravates inequalities and injustice in the ability to access and use information and knowledge;.

The Principles include a table of considerations to help determine when knowledge should be subject to more protection to safeguard the rights of traditional cultures and when knowledge should be more freely available for research, education and other public interest uses.

The IGC is currently negotiating a treaty on the protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions. Although the principles do not contain any specific language for the IGC’s work, they may nonetheless be useful in identifying options and considerations for balancing important public interests in the negotiation, including for the crafting of limitations and exceptions to any exclusive rights that may be included in a final treaty.