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TWENTIETH CONGRESS OF THE) 
REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES ) 
First Regular Session 
)
RfiCEP/LD
SENATE
S.B. No. 1131
Introduced by SENATOR IMEE R. MARCOS
AN ACT
SAFEGUARDING THE TRADITIONAL PROPERTY RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS 
PEOPLES, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES
EXPLANATORY NOTE
The Philippines is home to a rich cultural diversity, with an estimate of 14 to 17 
million Indigenous peoples representing 112 distinct ethno-linguistic groups. These 
communities maintain unique traditions, cultures, and ways of life that set them apart 
from mainstream society, often resulting in their marginalization. A report by World 
Mission, a Catholic missionary organization, notes that indigenous peoples are among 
the most disadvantaged, facing significant challenges in both social and economic 
development. Globally, they account for 15% of the world's poor, often experiencing 
poverty, low literacy rates, and high unemployment. According to the World Bank, 
despite their vital role in conservation, indigenous peoples experience 
disproportionately high levels of poverty. They make up only 6.2% of the global 
population, yet account for 18.2% of those living in extreme poverty worldwide.
One of the many struggles of the indigenous peoples is protecting their cultural 
heritage. To address this, the national government has enacted several laws, such as 
Republic Act No. 837, or the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act, and Republic Act No. 
8293 or the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, to recognize and protect the 
indigenous peoples' cultural heritage. However, the provisions of these laws are 
inadequate to protect the traditional cultural heritage and properties of the country's 
indigenous peoples and communities.
Indigenous peoples globally often face inadequate legal protection for their 
rights. While national laws and constitutions may recognize these rights, 
implementation often falls short, leaving indigenous communities vulnerable to 
displacement, violence, and exploitation.


It should be kept in mind that the indigenous peoples' rich culture and vibrant 
traditions contribute to the formation of a national identity that must be preserved 
across generations and treated with respect and honor. Thus, the immediate passage 
of this bill is earnestly sought.
. MARCOS


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TWENTIETH CONGRESS OF THE) 
REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES ) 
First Regular Session 
)
RIC!-.:''
SENATE
S.B. No. 1131
Introduced by SENATOR IMEE R. MARCOS
AN ACT
SAFEGUARDING THE TRADITIONAL PROPERTY RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS 
PEOPLES, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the Philippines in 
Congress assembled:
SECTION 1. Short Title. - This Act shall be known as the 
Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act'.
' Traditional Property
SEC. 2. Declaration of Policy. - It is hereby declared the policy of the State to 
protect the traditional cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples of the Philippines 
and safeguard the intrinsic values, whether tangible or intangible, and support the 
traditional artists and artisans in their contribution to their respective ethnic culture 
and national heritage by ensuring that their rights are protected.
SEC. 3. Definition of Terms. 
shall be defined as follows:
For purposes of this Act, the following terms
a. Commission refers to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts;
b. Community refers to the congregation of people with social cohesion and 
identity organized among common values interacting with intimacy and 
reciprocity in a shared circumscribed location in units larger than a 
household and has more similarities in the types and forms of their material 
goods;
c. Communal ownership refers to common ownership within a community;
d. Craft refers to the description of the family of artistic practices within the 
decorative arts, traditionally, which is defined by their relationship to 
functional or utilitarian products such as sculptural forms in the vessel 
tradition or by their use of such natural media as wood, clay, glass, textiles 
and metal;


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e. Cultural agencies refer to the following national government agencies with 
their specific areas of responsibility:
b.l. National Museum (cultural property);
b.2. National Library (books);
b.3. National Historical Institute (Philippine history);
b.4. National Archives (documents);
b.5. Cultural Center of the Philippines (culture and arts); and
b.6. Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (language).
f. Cultural heritage refers to the totality of cultural property preserved and 
developed through time and passed on to posterity;
g. Cultural property refers to all products of human creativity by which the 
people and nation reveal their identity, including churches, mosques and 
other places of religious worship, schools and natural history specimens and 
sites, whether publicly or privately owned, movable or immovable, and 
tangible or intangible;
h. Culture refers to the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and 
emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only 
art and literature but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, 
traditions and beliefs;
i. 
Derivative work refers to a new work provided that they do not violate any 
subsisting copyright upon the original work employed or any part thereof, 
or to imply any right to such use of the original works, or to secure or 
extend copyright in such original works. Derivative works may include: 
dramatizations, translations, adaptations, abridgements, arrangements, and 
other alterations of literary music work; collections of literary, scholarly or 
artistic works, and compilations of data and other materials which are 
original by reason of the selection or coordination or arrangement of their 
contents;
j. 
Indigenous peoples refer to group of people or homogenous societies 
identified by self-ascription and ascription by others, who have continuously 
lived as organized community on communally bounded and defined territory, 
and who have, under claims of ownership since time immemorial, occupied, 
possessed customs, tradition and other distinctive cultural traits, or who 
have, through resistance to political, social and cultural inroads of 
colonization, non-indigenous religions and culture, become historically 
differentiated from the majority of Filipinos;
k. Intangible cultural heritage refers to the practices, representations, 
expressions, knowledge, skills as well as the instruments, objects, and 
artifacts associated therewith, that the communities, groups and individuals 
recognize as part of their cultural heritage, such as (1) oral traditions, 
languages, expressions; (2) performing arts; (3) social practices, rituals and 
festive events; (4) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the


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universe; and (5) traditional craftmanship such as handloom weavings, 
wood carvings and pottery, among others;
Intangible cultural property refers to the people's learned processes along 
with the knowledge, skills and creativity that inform and are developed by 
them, the products they create and the resources, spaces and other aspects 
of social and natural context necessary for their sustainability;
Oral expression refers to the expression uttered by the mouth, spoken, oral 
testimony or transmitted by speech;
Ownership refers to the legal right of possession or proprietorship, the state, 
relation, or fact of being an owner, the rights or interests of an owner, 
ownership especially by a single person that is free of any encumbrances or 
limitations other than statutory;
Performance refers to the acting out of a ceremony, play, piece of music, 
etc., the execution or accomplishment of works, acts, feats etc., a particular 
action, deed or proceeding the manner in which or the efficiency with which 
something reacts or fulfills its intended purpose, and not necessarily as part 
of the social process;
Registry refers to the Philippine Registry of Cultural Property which is the 
registry of all cultural property of the country deemed of significant 
importance to our cultural heritage as defined in Republic Act No. 10066; 
Rites refer to the formal or ceremonial acts or procedures prescribed or 
customary in religious or other solemn use, or a particular form of system of 
religious or other ceremony;
Rituals refers to an established or prescribed procedure for a religious or 
other rite, a system or collection of religious of other rites; observance of 
set of forms in public worship, a prescribed or established or ceremonial 
acts of features collectively, as in religious services; any practice or pattern 
of behavior regulating social conduct;
Royalty refers to the payment to the holder of a patent or copyright or 
resource for the right to use their property;
Social process refers to the means by which culture and social organization 
change or are preserved due to process or practice;
Tangible cultural property refers to a cultural property with historical, 
archival, anthropological, archaeological, artistic and architectural value, 
and with exceptional or traditional production, whether of Philippine origin 
or not, including antiques and natural history specimens with significant 
value; and
Tradition refers to the beliefs, customs, practices, industries, expressions, 
whether tangible or intangible, maintained and shared differentially by 
society, and handed down from generation to generation. Tradition, in this 
respect, is a continuum that change and may arise in time and shall not 
therefore be subject to time limitation.


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SEC. 4. National Commission for Culture and the Arts. - The National 
Commission for Culture and the Arts, hereinafter referred to as the Commission, shall 
implement the provisions of this Act.
SEC. 5. Powers and Functions of the Commission. - The Commission shall 
exercise the folloiwing powers and functions:
a. Create an office, within its structure, to coordinate all efforts of the 
government and private agencies that have forms of tangible and intangible 
cultural heritage in making the Philippine Registry of Cultural Property and 
undertake to safeguard the viable national cultural heritage stipulated in the 
said registry;
b. With the approval of the Board, the Commission shall have the authority to 
reorganize its structure and staffing pattern in order to carry out its 
functions. The incumbent leaders of the existing Commission shall 
automatically be upgraded to analogous positions, with respect to the rest 
of the personnel;
c. Assist in identifying works and attributing authorship and shall be further 
responsible for maintaining and populating the registry;
d. Assist the claimants and relevant government agencies in resolving conflicts 
of ownership and attribution who will give permission to the people who 
wish to use the work upon discovery of the same in the database; and
e. Assist relevant government agencies in the prosecution of unauthorized use 
of intellectual property of indigenous peoples.
SEC. 6. Intellectual Property Rights of Ethno-Linguistic Groups. - Traditional 
cultural property, whether tangible or intangible, of all the ethno-linguistic groups that 
make up the people of the Philippines shall not lapse into public domain after fifty (50) 
years from creation and shall continue indefinitely to be the exclusive property of 
these ethno-linguistic groups that communally own them. Traditional heritage, both 
tangible and intangible, are to be held in perpetuity in ethnic memory and considered 
valid as ethnic intellectual property. However, the rights of an ethno-linguistic group 
to a traditional item will lapse into public domain after fifty (50) years, if it is no 
longer in production or used in cultural context within the society.
While recognizing that traditions change through time, the ethno-linguistic 
groups shall retain original rights to their intellectual property changing in continuum.
SEC. 7. Registry of Cultural Property. - Under the guidance of the Commission 
and National Museum, or any other pertinent national cultural agency, the local 
government units (LGUs), with the assistance of the National Commission for 
Indigenous Peoples, shall organize the inventories of cultural properties of the 
different ethno-linguistic groups of the Philippines that are distinctive, characteristics 
of or derived from their particular traditional culture, to the exclusion of those of 
others. The LGUs shall submit the inventories to the Commission, through the


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National Museum, to establish communal ownership and to be registered under the 
concerned group's name for protection under existing copyright law.
Further, the accomplished registries of the tangible and intangible cultural 
properties shall be incorporated in the Philippine Registry of Cultural Property as 
established by Republic Act No. 10066 and administered by the Commission.
SEC. 8. Derivative Work. - The infusion of personal or individual variations on 
a traditional object would result in a derivative work or craft, which is one that is 
primarily a new work but incorporates some previously published material. A 
derivative work must be different enough from the original to be regarded as a "new 
work" or must contain a substantial amount of new materials. Making minor changes 
or additions of little substance to a pre-existing work will not qualify the work as a 
new version for copyright purposes. The new material must be original and 
copyrightable in itself.
SEC. 9. Deposit and Notice. - Moral rights would vest upon creation; hence, 
authorship would have to be established to avail of moral rights such as the right of 
attribution. Moral rights to ownership of newly created items by members of an 
ethno-linguistic group should be registered with the Commission for protection under 
existing copyright laws. Copyright vests from the moment of creation and registration 
is one of the ways to prove authorship, although it is not exclusive.
SEC. 10. Free, Prior and Informed Consent. - Free, prior and informed consent 
for the use of the indigenous peoples' intellectual property should be articulated by a 
defined authority that is provided with a circumscribed jurisdiction, associated with 
the culture of an ethno-linguistic group. The corresponding elected official, as the 
case may be, assisted by cultural experts, shall dispense with the required free, prior 
and informed consent for the item(s) in questions for the concerned intellectual 
property owners.
SEC. 11. Indigenous communal copyright (intellectual property) owners may 
designate a society with legal personality to act in their behalf to enforce their 
economic and moral rights.
SEC. 12. Royalties. - Indigenous communal copyright (intellectual property) 
owners shall be compensated for the use of their work. The amount, process of 
collecting and distributing this royalty and other pertinent details shall be determined 
by the Commission.
SEC. 13. Appropriations. - For the initial implementation of this Act, the 
amount of Fifty Million Pesos (Php 50,000,000.00) is hereby appropriated and shall be 
sourced from the President's Contingent Fund.


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SEC. 14. Penalties. - In additional to the penalties under existing laws, any 
person found guilty of violating any provisions of this Act shall be imprisoned for a 
period not exceeding ten (10) years or imposed a fine not exceeding One Hundred 
Thousand Pesos (Php 100,000.00), or both at the discretion of the court.
SEC. 15. Implementing Rules and Regulations. - The Commission, in 
consultation with other relevant cultural agencies mentioned in this Act, shall 
promulgate the implementing rules and regulations within ninety (90) days after the 
effectivity of this Act.
SEC. 16. Repealing Clause. - All existing laws, presidential decrees, executive 
orders, proclamations, or administrative regulations that are inconsistent with the 
provisions of this Act are hereby amended, modified, superseded, or repealed 
accordingly.
SEC. 17. Separability Clause. - If any provision of this Act shall be held 
unconstitutional, the remainder of the Act not otherwise affected shall remain in full 
force and effect.
SEC. 18. Effectivity Clause. - This Act shall take effect fifteen (15) days after 
its publication in the Official Gazette or in at least two (2) newspapers of general 
circulation.
Approved,