Hmm defining traditional knowledge might be a little tricky – making enforcement of the affirmative near impossible when it will take forever to define what traditional knowledge is!
Drahos and Frankel 12, Professor Peter Drahos is an Australian academic and researcher specializing in the areas of intellectual property and global business regulation amongst others. Susy Rebecca Frankel FRSNZ is a New Zealand law academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the Victoria University of Wellington. (“Indigenous Peoples’ Innovation and Intellectual Property: The Issues”, ANU Press, 2012, Accessed on JSTOR via University of Michigan Library System, DOA: 6/29/24)//LFS – LMH
Traditional knowledge is perhaps the most open-ended concept that one might choose in this field. Some knowledge, argues Polanyi, cannot be specified by means of rules and can be passed on only through relationships of close learning such as master and apprentice.50 This form of personal knowledge depends on tradition. All societies, including capitalist societies, have traditional knowledge. Not surprisingly, a range of definitions of traditional knowledge has emerged from the literature.51 Traditional knowledge is sometimes linked to environmental or ecological knowledge, or to local knowledge held by groups such as farmers and fishermen (who may or may not be indigenous). Other definitional strategies include contrasting traditional knowledge with scientific knowledge, or specifying key properties for it such as oral transmission and its embeddedness in a non-materialist cosmology. All definitional strategies run into problems of one kind or another. For example, the contrast with science can be overplayed, as both traditional knowledge systems and science depend on the making of observation statements and testing. Returning to our earlier examples of the Wagiman people’s knowledge of the calorific and storage properties of damper made from the bush palm, and of Māori knowledge of the properties of harakeke, it is clear that this kind of knowledge must have involved a process of observation and experimentation. Trying to confine traditional knowledge to a class of knowledge (for example, ecological knowledge) or a class of people is very difficult. The reason that legal definitions place an emphasis on a determinate class of people is not necessarily related to the role that knowledge plays in a society, or even what constitutes knowledge, but rather it is to attribute rights, or ownership, to that class of persons. However, the value of indigenous knowledge sometimes arises because of the fact that it is attributable to an open-ended class, as in the case of the inter-generational development of plant knowledge: it has a proven pedigree.