AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

AAAS Project on Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Traditional Knowledge and the Public Domain

The public domain has been described as a space where intellectual property rights do not exist. The public domain consists of knowledge and information that has no individual owner or owners. Instead, the information is available to all members of society for use, development or experimentation. Permission is not necessary to use information in the public domain. This space is composed of general information and facts, knowledge once protected under IPRs that have since expired, or knowledge not previously part of the public domain that has since been designated part of the public domain.

For consideration of granting patents, the public domain serves as a prior art knowledge base. This knowledge base consists of all known, public knowledge. In general, when granting intellectual property protection for knowledge, the claimed knowledge is first compared to the prior art base to determine its novelty.

There is already much information on traditional knowledge in the public domain, although much of this information did not arrive there with the informed consent of the originators of that knowledge. For centuries, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, and explorers, to name but a few, have collected data, and through traditional forms of publication and now the Internet, have fed this information into the public domain. The result is that once this information has entered the public domain, the originators loose the option to seek intellectual property protections.

Because patent granting offices throughout the world must make an effort to search for any prior art in order not to grant an invalid patent on an invention, even if the original inventor(s) lost their discovery to the public domain, it is important that the information be utilized as prior art. While the original inventor(s) may not be able to gain intellectual property protections themselves, access to the public domain will help assure that others will not.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge Prior Art Database (T.E.K.* P.A.D.)