What is a community?

1. What is a community? An indigenous community for the purposes of the Bill could be any group of people who live in SA. The Bill seems to acknowledge the dynamism of the ‘traditional’ and its only requirement for legitimacy is its recognition as such by an indigenous community

2. Triggers for protection Protection is triggered either by an aspiration towards an economic opportunity (e.g. royalties) or a need to defend its collective nature (e.g. to prevent appropriation and to allow free non-commercial use). The Bill is a mix of but raises the question of who benefits from the opportunities and sets the terms of use

3. Public domain vs. public availability Protection under the bill is linked to knowledge in the public domain. If knowledge is a secret, then the ‘indigenous community/company’ can get standard IPR protections and don’t need the database - The TK is ‘publicly available’. The Bill recognizes and undercuts this by denying the community the right to set the terms of access

4. The Database -Community contribution versus state collection Indian model- PBR (community led and focused on rights recognition) versus TKDL (state led and restricted access-defensive). So who decides when TK is actually in the public domain for it to then be owned by the State (in the case of the Bill- the Fund)

5. TRUST FUND A utilization approach to royalties and challenges of retroactivity Bioprospecting trust fund versus traditional intellectual property trust fund- general beneficiaries versus specific beneficiaries

6. Challenge based models State owns all knowledge in public domain and wants to keep it in the public domain State owns all knowledge in public domain and wants to profit from its use Communities own their knowledge and set terms of access and benefit sharing Community knowledge commons that foreground community values of knowledge sharing