Laws on intellectual property rights are so confused they are reducing intellectual handbag  rights claims by indigenous people to barely a trickle," said Tania Bubela of the School of Public Health, University of Alberta (Canada), co-author of Toward a New Era of Intellectual Property: From Confrontation to Negotiation. "It has become clear that we need more than property rights to protect traditional knowledge and ensure fair and equitable benefit sharing with indigenous communities for the use of their knowledge."

"Many countries have made moves to protect traditional handbag knowledge, but they have largely been ineffective because they focus on who owns the property rights," she continued. "The extreme difficulty of determining this has effectively acted as a road-block to progress." The report says that despite efforts to create legislation that would benefit indigenous groups for their knowledge of medicinal plants, Brazil's overly bureaucratic system has become a hinderance to protecting indigenous handbag knowledge, chiefly because laws are interpreted to "depend on the free and informed consent of all the local communities that potentially or actually hold them".http://www.ourmanufacturer.com