A/HRC/20/26 competition, and facilitates new drug combinations for simpler treatment. The UNITAID Medicines Patent Pool, for example, encourages new generic formulations by facilitating patent-sharing and streamlining the production of new medicines in currently underresearched areas. A new royalty-free license for patents on the HIV/AIDS antiretroviral drug Darunavir introduced by the United States National Institutes of Health led to Gilead Science licensing its patents on several drugs to the Patent Pool. 63. In the field of agricultural biotechnology, initiatives include the multi-country Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, in which more than 40 public institutions seek to lower barriers created by intellectual property regimes and to facilitate technology transfer. Research is also encouraged by such open-source experiments as the Biological Open Source (BiOS) License, which offers researchers free access to key technologies provided that they share any improvements made to these tools under the BiOS open source license regime.71 64. A separate, often raised concern relates to the threat posed by “bioprospecting” for traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples and other local communities. In response, many States are developing databases for the documentation and conservation of traditional knowledge. Interesting models for protecting traditional knowledge from misappropriation include the India Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (www.tkdl.res.in/tkdl/langdefault/common/), which provides national patent offices with access to 223,000 indigenous medicinal formulations. As a result, at least two patents have been withdrawn and more than 75 applications withdrawn, rejected or amended. Some States, such as, Brazil, Guatemala, Peru and Portugal, have taken measures to give legal protection to the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities to their accumulated scientific knowledge. Further discussion is needed, however, on the modalities and conditions under which others should benefit from such accumulated knowledge, and how to allow further development and dissemination of such knowledge while safeguarding the moral and material interests of the individual or collective creators. Agrobiodiversity, maintained and transmitted as a common public good by local farmers, also needs to be addressed.72 WIPO is currently conducting “text-based negotiations” with a view to reaching an agreement on an international legal instrument(s) which “will ensure the effective protection of genetic resources, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions”.73 65. The Special Rapporteur points out that legal scholars have increasingly questioned the economic effectiveness of intellectual property regimes in promoting scientific and cultural innovation. Scholars have found no evidence to support the assumption that scientific creativity is only galvanized by legal protection or that the short-term costs of limiting dissemination are lower than the long-term gain of additional incentives. Consequently, the Special Rapporteur proposes the adoption of a public good approach to knowledge innovation and diffusion, and suggests reconsidering the current maximalist intellectual property approach to explore the virtues of a minimalist approach to IP protection.74 Recalibrating intellectual property norms that may present a barrier to the right 71 72 73 74 De Schutter (see footnote 19). De Schutter, op. cit. WIPO submission, p. 17. See in particular Shaver, “The right to science and culture” (see footnote 6), pp. 128 and 159-160; Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Market and Freedoms, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 36; James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, Yale University Press, 2008, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Knowledge as a global public good”, in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul et al. eds., UNDP, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308–09. 17