Discourses of local knowledge and categories of rights claimants thereto are embroiled in complex conceptual and analytical morass. The conceptual quandary around local knowledge is diversionary from the historically rooted hierarchies of culture, power and politics that have subjugated it. Claims to local knowledge are challenged from several dimensions, including arguments from cultural cosmopolitanism, intellectual property rights and aspects of liberal democratic principles. An interesting new site for this power play is the emergent bioprospecting framework of access and benefit sharing. In this context, sophisticated external intermediaries, who have asymmetrical power relationships with custodians of local knowledge, now constitute a new threat to the genuine aspirations of indigenous and local communities. Recently, local knowledge claims are conflated with propertization of culture raising concerns over the asphyxiation of the public domain. Making the claims or claimants to local knowledge the scapegoats of our troubled public domain undermines the source of the problem. In a way, the current anemic state of our public domain can be blamed on unwholesome expansion of intellectual property and unidirectional appropriation of local knowledge by external interests. The reality of cultural cosmopolitanism requires an intellectual property order that is responsive to the contributions of local knowledge.
In 2000, African countries expressed reservation over the adoption of UPOV Act of 1991 as a model of plant breeders’ rights (PBRs) for TRIPS‐compliance. For the continent, an acceptable system of PBRs protection would include the protection of the rights of communities and associated indigenous knowledge, innovations, technologies and farming practices. One and half decades after, Africa has virtually reversed itself and embraced the UPOV‐PBRs system notwithstanding the latter's narrow focus on breeders and marginal reference to farmers. This Article critically explores the concerted sites of pressures, especially free trade and economic partnership agreements, and related policies through which Africa appears to have capitulated and upturned its policy position on PBRs. The continent's present priority over the implementation of PBRs through various regional and national legal initiatives currently at the instance of African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI), the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), the Southern African Economic Community (SADC) and specific country initiatives are explored. The article highlights the basis for the incongruity of Africa's newfound interest in the UPOV‐PBRs system—a regime not designed for the farmer‐centered tenor of African agriculture. It calls attention to the continued relevance of Africa's 2000 Model Law, especially as it applies to PBRs and recommends reality assessment as an important step toward the formulation of IPRs system suited for stakeholders in African agriculture for the continent's food security and food sovereignty.
The Nigerian movie industry, known as Nollywood, has attracted an impressive degree of research interest since its debut in the 1990s, resulting in a dedicated transdisciplinary research niche called Nollywood studies. Nollywood is situated as disruptive of historic and contemporary African movie culture, underscoring Nollywood's significance as a phenomenon “fundamental to Africa's self‐representation.” In this study, we examine Nollywood in relation to its collaborative model of innovation, its unique form of openness and other factors implicated in its creative diffusion as a phenomenon across Africa and its diaspora. We also explore Nollywood's emergence as an unexpected creative force in the world of entertainment. The study evaluates the evolutionary interface between technology and entrepreneurship as a dynamic process in the progress and transformation of Nollywood. Complementing the issue of technology, as a factor in Nollywood's evolution, the study identifies a complex aggregation of other factors, including culture, ethnicity, marketing and entrepreneurial ingenuity, liberal art infrastructure and Nigeria's abundant social capital and how they have coalesced to put entertainment alongside oil and agriculture as one of the highest employers of labour and as a surprising dispenser of economic oxygen in Africa's most populous country and its largest economy. Our starting premise is that Nollywood owes its evolution to technological innovation and many unexplored contextual contingencies. The study also identifies and examines forms of openness in Nollywood, within and outside of existing paradigms, and how they factor into the industry's success. Nollywood operates in a fluid borderline between formal and informal frameworks. In Nollywood, a pragmatic and evolving approach to intellectual property systems and openness reflects aspects of its unique business model with contextual sensitivity and, in a way, advances its transnationalisation, albeit counter intuitively. Nollywood represents a grassroots indigenous entrepreneurial cultural initiative. Our project provides insights into the scalability potential of the Nollywood phenomenon and its cross‐sectoral ramifications for innovation and entrepreneurship on the African continent. The study applies a combination of methodological strategies aimed at eliciting, reifying and drawing substantively on industry practitioners’ voices and perspectives. It taps into stakeholders’ mastery, institutional history, and knowledge of Nollywood's evolution and its modus operandi.
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