John Roughan: Knowledge belongs to us all

The Waitangi Tribunal has suggested that a tribe could register a guardianship interest in its knowledge of a species. Photo / Peter Daniel

In the course of researching Auckland's history last year I had the privilege of hearing an authentic account of one of the tribes that lived here before Europeans arrived. It was a story I wanted the teller to write, and he did.

But the written version, approved by his tribal authorities, was a pale reflection of the stories he'd told me. They were, like European history, dominated by battles and conquests to the exclusion of ordinary life, and some features were distinct.

Victories were massacres and enemies were eaten. War parties on missions of utu would wipe out neutral populations in their path. Not a woman or child would be spared.

Eating the dead was the rule. When exceptions were made it was for adversaries deserving of particular honour.

I don't know whether it would be possible to write these stories in the way he told them, utterly dispassionately, non-judgmentally, accepting the past on its own terms. I found myself appalled and enchanted at the same time.

I was struck also by his respect for fact. He was carrying knowledge that had been handed down to him and I doubt it has been written anywhere. He had nothing on paper with him. He could recount all that he had been told with total precision.

That was my first experience of oral history and it was more impressive than I'd imagined.

But a culture without writing develops one serious defect. It has to treat knowledge as privileged information, not public property. Orally transmitted knowledge can be given only to those trusted to preserve it. You cannot have all sorts of careless versions running around to be passed down the centuries.

At the ghostly hour of 5am on the Saturday before last, the Waitangi Tribunal released a weighty report that a European mind like mine finds a little scary.

It proposes to give Maori a property right on all sorts of knowledge they have inherited. The tribunal believes some of this knowledge may be of interest to science and medicine, notably the therapeutic properties of several native plants and the genetic characteristics of some of the many species that have evolved here and nowhere else.

It is 20 years since a claim was filed with the tribunal asserting ownership of native flora and fauna, as well as human creations. The claim, known by its number, Wai 262, challenged the whole idea that knowledge is a universal human birthright.

To the claimants this was a purely Pakeha notion, dating from the invention of the printing press and the advances of science that Westerners call the age of enlightenment.

The Wai 262 claimants noted that the universal right to knowledge was compromised anyway by Western laws protecting "intellectual property". They feared those very laws could see Maori knowledge become the intellectual property of American pharmaceutical companies and other ogres.

But there is an important difference between the intellectual property protected in laws of patent and copyright and the intellectual property Wai 262 would protect.

The tribunal has acknowledged that patents and copyright do not restrict knowledge and its discovery, they apply only to a method of using it or expressing it, and for a limited time.

An author cannot copyright an original idea or information discovered. Only the author's expression of the idea or information can be exclusive property, usually sold to a publisher.

Likewise, an inventor can patent a process or a product but not the knowledge that was used in it, and he patent provides a monopoly on the product only for as long as needed to encourage other inventive efforts.

Western liberal protections of intellectual property are an incentive for further discovery and advances in public knowledge, not to make it permanently anyone's exclusive possession.

The Waitangi Tribunal has taken 20 years to wrestle with Wai 262. Most of the original claimants have died, the tribunal's personnel have changed. Its report runs to two volumes in an attempt to resolve the "tension between Maori and Pakeha approaches to knowledge".

It says, the Maori approach "does not place such great value on free access ... access must be earned."

The tribunal has not endorsed outright ownership of knowledge but proposed a guardianship right that amounts to the same thing. A tribe would be able to register a guardianship interest in its knowledge of a species - or even a "kinship" with a species - and on that basis have the right to prevent or control its use in science for all time.

I think this asks too much. The open exchange of knowledge is perhaps the most potent and splendid achievement of mankind. Some "Pakeha" values are simply better.

This column will take a break for the next two weeks.