Ownership of Biodiversity
Typology
From the Wikipedia:
"The rights at issue in the biopiracy debates are primarily ownership rights. Who (if anyone) owns the Earth's biodiversity? Under what circumstances is it appropriate to talk of 'ownership' of biodiversity, or of particular examples of it? Various and sometimes inconsistent regional and international laws and regulations assign ownership rights to many entities. Moreover, regardless of the legal situation, the case for any party having an ethical right to ownership of biological resources is a separate issue.
Ownership rights of national governments
Under current international law, national governments exercise a degree of physical control over the biological resources within their country, just as they control mineral rights. However, it is less clear that governments have the right (or even the power) to control knowledge of the application of biological resources, nor are governments able in practice to control the extraction of biological resources in small amounts for research purposes.[citation needed]
An advantage of national government ownership is that some national governments may be strong enough to defend property rights (e.g. against pharmaceutical corporations or other nations).Among objections to national government ownership is the fact that there may be conflicts of interest in developing countries between national governments and local communities. High biodiversity tends to occur in the least developed regions. National governments tend to represent the more developed and urbanised populations of a country.[citation needed] Ethnic, historical, and cultural gaps between governmentally well-represented groups and the populations of the least developed regions are not infrequent. The knowledge at issue in the biopiracy debates is often the knowledge of local communities, not the knowledge of their governments.
Ownership rights of local communities
Many groups argue that it is the local communities who possess the traditional biomedical knowledge should benefit from the commercial use of such knowledge. Ownership rights should be attributed to these communities in order to safeguard their interests.
One argument against this is that patent and copyright law are widely implemented as temporary legal mechanisms. Under most intellectual property laws, patents and copyrights expire. In many cases where local communities have been using traditional medicines for generations, these kinds of intellectual property rights would have expired.[citation needed] Many such indigenous groups maintain that their knowledge of the medicines should be protected on an international scale according to each group's internal intellectual property laws.
All humankind as the owner of biodiversity
A more humanistic view of this debate is the claim that biodiversity is something that should be held in common by people in general. Under this view, any and all people who have a need for an advantage reaped by scientific exploration should be granted access to it." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopiracy)