"Inventors may patent a particular application of scientific information--a human invention--but not the information itself, which is nature's invention." 192
When reading the article "Telling Tales out of school" by C. McSherry I couldn't help but think about the above statement in respect to the dilemma presented in Brown's article. The debate about culture and if a copyright value can be placed on tribal art is one that can be better understood when linked with the concept of 'nature's invention.' While the western approach would deem 'nature's invention' something created with less human interaction, many tribal communities have a belief system that does not have such a fine line between what nature creates and what humans create as inspired by nature or spirituality. Once again this leads to the debate about how certain pieces of work should be treated by western law if the laws of the culture in which it was created do not match.
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