This article suggests three critical inquiries for formulating a feminist analysis of patent law. The first questions how patent law functions as a strategy within neoliberal, biopolitics. The second examines how patent law is structured through biopolitical techniques of governance by examining two conceptions of the public domain I call open public domain and protective public domain. The third inquiry, drawing upon feminist science studies, asks how women's reproductive and intellectual labor are valued and devalued in various different ways through new patent law technologies. In addition, two recent patent law are struggles are examined. These include an American Civil Liberties Union case against the patenting of breast cancer gene sequences and Southern African San struggles against patents related to the Hoodia gordonii plant. In conclusion, I argue that patent law functions within gendered and ethno-racialized forms of neoliberal, biopolitics involving the patenting of women's reproductive and intellectual labor within new bioeconomics.

An international conference on “Asian Urban Heritage,” organized by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Thailand Association, took place in the city of Phuket 15–17 October, 2011. The conference was organized and hosted in collaboration with Phuket Province, Phuket Municipality, the Thai Perankan Association, Phuket Old Town Community, Old Phuket Town Foundation, Department of Architecture–Chulangkorn University and the Department of Architecture–Thammasat University. The conference invited papers on five subthemes: Heritage Management, Legal Protection and Incentives, Historic Urban Landscapes, Climate Change and Disaster Prevention, and Industrial Heritage.

The International Journal of Cultural Property is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes papers and other materials representing a broad set of perspectives on problems relating to cultural property, cultural heritage, and related issues. Contributions are welcome from the wide variety of fields implicated in the debates—law, anthropology, public policy, archaeology, art history, preservation, museum-, tourism-, and heritage studies—and from a variety of perspectives and interests—indigenous, Western, and non-Western; academic, professional and amateur; consumers and producers—to promote meaningful discussion of the complexities, competing values, and other concerns that form the environment within which these disputes exist.

The experience of the indigenous communities regarding access and benefit sharing under the national regimes based on provisions of Convention on Biological Diversity and Bonn Guidelines has not been satisfactory. The communities expect that noncommercial values should be respected and misappropriation should be prevented. Some academics and civil society groups have suggested that traditional knowledge commons and biocultural protocols will be useful in ensuring that while noncommercial values are respected, access and benefit sharing takes place on conditions that are acceptable to the communities. This proposal is examined in this context in the larger context of access and benefit sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity and implementing prior informed consent principles in access and benefit sharing. This article examines knowledge commons, provides examples from constructed commons in different sectors and situates traditional knowledge commons in the context of debates on commons and public domain. The major shortcomings of traditional commons and bicultural protocol are pointed out, and it is suggested that these are significant initiatives that can be combined with the Nagoya Protocol to fulfill the expectations of indigenous communities.

The 17th General Assembly of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) took place at the UNESCO Headquarters, Paris (France), from 27 November to 2 December 2011, under the high patronage of Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO, and Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic. The events included meetings of the Advisory and Executive Committees, the Scientific Council, International Scientific Committees (ISCs); the Scientific Symposium; and the General Assembly. According to the ICOMOS official report, this conference had a record attendance of 1200 registered participants, representing 106 countries and 77 National Committees. The generous grants offered to National Committees through the ICOMOS Victoria Falls Fund and the Getty Foundation made it possible for 63 professionals from 47 countries to attend the event.

This essay examines theories of value and property in relation to conceptions of morality, correct comportment, and their influences on Afro-Bahians subject to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural heritage initiatives in the Pelourinho neighborhood of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. This urban space is the nation's most expressive site for the performance of Afro-Brazilian identity and the commemoration of tradition. In analyzing the role of morality in Pelourinho-based cultural property-making, I focus on popular critiques of heritage discourse to argue that, in conjuring a particular form of cultural heritage that bears a distinct resemblance to UNESCO's immaterial patrimony programs, the Bahian state has piggybacked on social scientific evaluations of local people's moral comportments in order to put together an archive of everyday life that exists as a standing reserve for histories of Brazil and the marketing of cultural heritage. This data produced in an effort to regulate the historical center has revolved around the state's evaluation of the moral probity and everyday habits of the Pelourinho's overwhelmingly Afro-Brazilian populace. The result is a conceptualization of cultural labor that emanates not from the capacities and struggles of producers, but from a decentered or distributed view of production, which I tie to the existence of this archive. Consumers, or visitors to the historical center, as well as historical archives thus play a critical role in this form of constructing property and understanding the sources and fungibility of labor in a global economy for multicultural difference that depends on an emphasis on futurity and market reflexivity.

In response to the emerging phenomenon of the role of nonstate actors in heritage protection and preservation, a one-day symposium took place on 16 March 2012 in the new Allard Hall building of the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The conference was officially opened by Dean of Law, Professor Mary Anne Bobinski and received financial support from the University of British Columbia, Faculty of Law Conference Fund; the Pacific Northwest Canadian Studies Consortium; and Golder Associates Ltd. The conference brought together seven experts from both academia and practice to discuss contemporary practices and emerging legal and sociological trends in heritage protection by private actors.

Scientific plagiarism is as sui generis as the author function in science. A study of the specificity of scientific plagiarism and the ways in which it diverges from appropriation in other disciplines allows us to question traditional definitions that focus on the copying of published copyrighted materials. The form of plagiarism that is most damaging to scientists does not involve publications, is largely outside the scope of copyright law, and is unlikely to be detected by textual-similarity algorithms. The same features that make this kind of plagiarism difficult to identify and control also provide a powerful window on the unique construction of authorial credit in science, the problems of peer review, and the limitations of plagiarism surveillance technologies.

The meeting of experts in Warsaw is one of the activities marking the 20th anniversary of the Memory of the World (MoW) program. The events started on 1 April and were held throughout 2012, including a MoW Exhibition at the UNESCO headquarters that focused on items that are listed on MoW Register (national, regional, and international) and an international conference held 26–28 September 2012 in Vancouver, Canada, on Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation. The challenges and solutions relating to the impact of the technological advances for the preservation and accessibility of the documentary heritage have occupied the attention of UNESCO for some time, culminating in the adoption of the Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage by the 32nd session of the General Conference of UNESCO on 17 October 2003.

The international law of culture is a broad field, which certainly goes beyond the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as the international organization entrusted with, among other things, cultural affairs. Indeed, if one considers the far-reaching definition of culture, then a vast number of institutions, rules of hard and soft law, and initiatives of different scope and shape exist, and new ones come into being. This institutional complexity and the ensuing rule fragmentation are indicative of multiple scenes of contestation, denoted by different actors, politics, dynamics, and often strong path dependencies, which make meaningful communication between them and a solution-oriented forward thinking difficult. In scholarship, too, there appears to be increasing specialization, which carves out topics and subtopics, such as the UNESCO versus the World Trade Organization (WTO) clash, cultural heritage preservation, or indigenous peoples' rights. This may, despite the deeper knowledge won, hinder pinpointing appropriate regulatory responses at the international level, which could address cultural rights comprehensively.

Fourteen years after the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention came into force, the first special meeting as envisaged under Article 20 of the Convention was held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris on 19 June 2012. Article 20 provides that “The President of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) may at regular intervals, or at any time at the request of five Contracting states, convene a special committee in order to review the practical operation of this Convention.” Appropriately, the first special committee meeting took place at UNESCO's head office, preceding by a day the second meeting of States Parties to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership Cultural Property, which convened in Paris on 20–21 June 2012. The UNIDROIT Convention was initiated at the request of UNESCO to fill the gap in the 1970 Convention relating to the private law aspects of the return and restitution of stolen or illegally exported cultural property.

The UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was adopted in Paris on 14 November 1970. It came into force on 24 April 1972. It took over 30 years for the first Meeting of States Parties to the Convention to take place on 15 October 2003. The second meeting, the subject of this report, took place after a shorter period of about nine years, on 20–21 June 2012. A Meeting of States Parties to a treaty is primarily a forum to discuss and agree on measures that can be taken to improve its effectiveness and the realization of the aims and objectives of the instrument. Accordingly, the meeting was tasked with examining in depth the impact of the measures taken by States Parties to the Convention in order to optimize its implementation, and also to consider and approve whatever efficacious measures should be taken for its best functioning.