Abstract
Anthropological discussions of intellectual property developed in the beginning of the 20th century, mainly as part of a debate that is more generally oriented towards the understanding of human creatitivy, and the value attributed to those creations. But observing those different forms of exchange of incorporeal items also challenges our conceptions of materiality. Taking on Malinowski's idea of understanding, the world through the study of the Papuean society, we can see those observations as a resource with which we can think through and analyze problems that are common to the people in the world. The specific term indigenous is used here to refer to particular people and groups around the world who are seen as natives, associated with a definite territory and have developed autonomously specific types of practices. What is of interest here is to compare the systems of entitlement over incorporeal objects that have been constructed in totally different contexts, and those that were progressively born in the Western world during a period that stretches from the Renaissance until now. In this paper we will consider copyright in a broad sense as the restrictions that create legitimate entitlement to circulate the reproductions of specified objects. I will focus, most of the time, on the constructions developed in the Melanesian societies.
