A Study on Norms in Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage

Korea has built and is operating a normative framework that protects Intangible Cultural Heritage through the Cultural Heritage Protection Act. Since 2001, WIPO has been discussing new international norm protecting Traditional Cultural Expressions.The core of the discussion is to reflect the interests of indigenous peoples in the course of transmission and utilization of intangible cultural heritage. This paper has tried to apply the draft treaty submitted in the WIPO IGC meeting to the Korean traditional cultural expressions. But, there were a lot of ambiguous points remained in building the new normative framework. This paper concluded that the new framework is based a lot on the existing IPR norms that has limits in protecting the Intangible Cultural Heritage. In domestic situations where the relevant norms do not exist, we need to consider a new way to reflect the interests of the community, including ‘research ethics’ like the case in Australia.