Heritable knowledge trusts are an interesting model for protecting indigenous knowledge.
“The Heritable Innovation Trust Program was created after the 2008 “Heritable Knowledge Framework and the Development of Communal Innovation Trusts” document written by Dr. David Martin. However, reaching from the newest soil erupting from Tavurvur in Papua New Guinea, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, to the oldest and largest known empire on Earth in Mongolia, the Heritable Innovation Trust is quickly diversifying and growing.
The traditional intellectual property frameworks of the major areas, such as Europe and The U.S. are based on many values which do not apply in many cultures around the world. The reason for this is inherent in Heritable Knowledge.”
“The Heritable Innovation Trust (H.I.T.) is framework developed as an alternative to the intellectual property system that is held under contract law, giving it a more flexible structure to allow for the consideration of innovations with communal stewardship and adapted over time. By operating under contract law and with an end-user-license agreement, the H.I.T. does not have the same jurisdictional limitations that patent, copyright, or trademark filings do. H.I.T. teams are invited to companies and communities around the globe to become experts on the culture and innovations of their hosts all of which is then documented into the trust repository that exists both in book form and as an online database. Community analyses are compiled using Integral Accounting, as system by which environments are assessed based on six dimensions: commodity, custom & culture, knowledge, money, technology, and well-being. Integral Accounting provides a more comprehensive look at the whole of a community to provide context for interactions and the innovations shared by the community. Any utilization of the information held in perpetual trust under the H.I.T. framework must be done in reciprocity, meaning that the first order transaction is always knowledge of how the information will be used then any further engagement must be done so in partnership with the originators of the information.” – Katie Martin