News release

From:

Dr Jesse Pirini (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Whakatōhea), Senior Lecturer in Management at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, and an author of this paper, comments:

"There's a common misconception that Māori interests in intellectual property are mostly about stopping others from misusing Mātauranga. That defensive framing is only part of the story.

"The innovators we interviewed, working across te ao Māori, were eager to use IP tools for both protection and commercialisation. But current discussions around registries of indigenous knowledge miss both goals. Conceived from within a Western IP framework, registries are designed to service the IP system, and in doing so, they cannot hold what actually matters to mātauranga Māori: the whakapapa and hononga that give knowledge its meaning and its life. The more interesting question is what a system designed from within te ao Māori might look like instead."