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Unit of Study LAWS2049 - Wisdom, Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property (2022)

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Unit Snapshot

  • Enrolment information

    This is an intensive unit taught over 4 days in the first week of session. Class times and room details will be provided on the School of Law and Justice website and posted to the learning site. Students must be able to commit to the delivery mode before enrolling in this unit.

Unit description

Introduces students to basic concepts associated with intellectual property and how these forms of law interact with traditional knowledge and cultural expressions. Students will engage in analytical discussions concerning assigned readings and case based analysis from real-word scenarios presented during class. In this iteration of the course the real-world scenarios will be drawn from South Asia.

Unit content

Topic 1: Thinking About Law, Culture, and Property

Topic 2: Introduction to Intellectual Property Mechanisms and the Logics of Ownership

Topic 3: Culture as Resource, Culture as Property

Topic 4: Traditional Knowledge v. Modern Knowledge: The Difficulty of Intellectual Property in Accounting for Cultural Expression

Topic 5: Cultural Piracy: Early Examples and Key Disputes

Topic 6: Solutions at Law: The Development of Cultural Property Protections

Topic 7: Solutions Outside the Law: Non-legal solutions with legal implications

Topic 8: Alternative Conceptions of Ownership and Connectivity, The Case of Yoga and Intellectual Property

 

Availabilities

Not currently available in 2022

Learning outcomes

Unit Learning Outcomes express learning achievement in terms of what a student should know, understand and be able to do on completion of a unit. These outcomes are aligned with the graduate attributes. The unit learning outcomes and graduate attributes are also the basis of evaluating prior learning.

On completion of this unit, students should be able to:

demonstrate and critically analyse how the concepts of law, culture and property relate to one another in legal and humanistic scholarship

demonstrate knowledge of the basic history, theory, and ethics that have underpinned the emergence of intellectual property, particularly as this domain of law relates to traditional knowledge and cultural heritage

analyse the significance of existing law on intellectual and cultural property, as well as how these laws function to protect or fail to protect traditional knowledge

explain how intellectual property mechanisms have been used both to exploit and protect cultural heritage and traditional knowledge in the past, as well as think about how such mechanisms might be used in the future

demonstrate basic knowledge of specific case studies where questions of intellectual property have figured prominently in the management of cultural heritage and traditional knowledge

demonstrate their skills in legal research, critical analysis and the written presentation of research and argument