Intellectual Property Rights and Indigenous Dress Heritage: Towards More Social Planning Types of Practices via User-Centric Approaches

The chapter explores the role of legal design in tackling challenges related to balancing protection and access while applying intellectual property rights to indigenous dress heritage (DH). First, we address the problems with the current mainstream approach to IPR, where the main focus is on economic incentives, while societal values are generally less considered. We then contextualize this discourse within the framework of indigenous DH, focusing on Sámi DH. Our analysis shows how moving from a purely economic-centric to a more social-planning type of justification for IPR could help in better reflecting societal values into IP. We argue that a design thinking approach would be important to reach this goal and we elaborate on how legal design could trigger such positive development.