INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
INDIGENOUS / TRADITIONAL / LOCAL KNOWLEDGE ISSUES
web@andersonip.info
Jane Anderson is a legal scholar, a consultant and an advocate on intellectual property and Indigenous/traditional/local knowledge resources. Jane Anderson holds a PhD in Law from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her work is focused on the philosophical and practical problems for intellectual property law and the protection of Indigenous/traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. In addition to her theoretical and philosophical work in this field, Jane has worked on a range of intellectual property and Indigenous knowledge projects with Indigenous communities and organizations in Australia, Indonesia, Canada and the United States.
In Australia these projects have focused on addressing Indigenous interests in access, control and ownership of ethnographic and cultural materials within libraries, archives and museums and the digital repatriation of this material back to communities. In Indonesia as part of an inter-disciplinary research team, Jane worked with local artists and community leaders, non-governmental organizations and Indonesian government officials to develop alternative legal strategies for the protection of traditional artistic expressions across the Indonesian archipelago.
Jane is also working on several ongoing projects: namely, in Canada with Greg Young-Ing, Merle C. Alexander and the Indigenous Peoples Caucus on the development of practical guidelines for Indigenous and local communities when developing intellectual property protocols; as a Project Ethnographer for the SSHRC Project Intellectual Property in Cultural Heritage: Theory, Practice, Policy, Ethic; and with the World Intellectual Property Organization on the development of an international alternative dispute resolution/mediation service for intellectual property and Indigenous/traditional/local knowledge disputes.
Her book Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law was published in 2009 with Edward Elgar Press, UK.