This article considers the intersection of gender, traditional cultural expressions, collaborative innovation, and intellectual property in the Tonga Indigenous community of Zambia. Based on a study of the Tonga rural women basket makers who are organized around craft clubs, the study investigated the collaborative environment that fosters the preservation of the cultural tradition of basket weaving, the impact it has had on empowering the women, and the legal protection options available for the Tonga baskets. The study found that Zambia’s 2016 Protection of Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources and Expressions of Folklore Act no. 16 (Traditional Knowledge Act) gives automatic protection to traditional cultural expressions and the option for the protection of traditional cultural expressions under the existing intellectual property laws. Though intellectual property protection may not be practical for the Tonga baskets, the Traditional Knowledge Act is a significant step in recognizing the customary values and governance principles in protecting traditional cultural expressions. Registration, in terms of the Traditional Knowledge Act, could enhance the recognition of the baskets, preserve and promote the cultural heritage, and empower the Tonga women.

In this article, we aim to focus on how the Iberian past (sixth century to the first century BC) has been used both to shape identities and to produce values in the marketplace and how the triad of the past, authenticity, and tradition is key in the commodification of the Iberian world. To do so, we will examine developments in the village of Moixent (Valencia, Spain). In this town, the Iberians and their archaeological remains are presented as the protagonists of the area, accompanied by several “heritage stratifications.” Through case studies of family-run wineries, we analyze the process of symbolic appropriation of the Iberians in the local wine sector and its confluence with cultural tourism as well as how it has led to the development of territorial branding based on the past.

Dance has rarely been accepted as the subject of copyright protection because works of dance and choreography have lacked commodified property-object status in intellectual property law. If dance is “haunted by its own ephemerality” and, thus, rarely embodied as property, then what of dance music? Music composed, performed, and recorded with a dance audience in mind has formed, on many occasions, the subject matter of intellectual property law claims, as the rancorous recent litigation over the nightclub (and online-streaming) hit “Blurred Lines” demonstrates. In this article, I utilize the case study of traditional Irish dance music to explore how traditional music occupies a space somewhat outside the formal legal system, defined by informal social norms such as reciprocity, sharing, and acknowledgment (attribution). I consider how Irish traditional music can be represented as heritage and as property, reflecting on the type of ownership at play in the Irish traditional music community. I observe that Irish traditional dance music provides an example of “heritage as resistance” – a mode of cultural and social practice that continues to thrive as a living tradition, even in the contemporary market-oriented world of the global North.

This article discusses the implications of recording and digitizing a variety of cultural and contemporary dance performance practices, core to a European project known as WhoLoDancE, which focused on issues of reuse, ownership, property, and responsibility. The recordings and subsequent processing of dance material into digital data raised questions about the responsibilities to the dancers who have contributed their material to the project, particularly when it is transformed into data visualizations that can be accessed and reused by others. The article not only focuses on how value accrues in these kinds of resources and sometimes in unexpected ways but also draws attention to how dance remains bound to the communities in which it is performed and tends to resist its abstraction from the body to be commodified as a form of cultural property. This then points to how dance, as intangible cultural heritage, is self-regulating in terms of principles of ownership and attribution.

The May 2004 decision of the London High Court in the matter of Thomson v. Christie's captured the interest of the salacious British press for its glamorous players: the Canadian heiress, the English aristocrat, and the international auction house. Taylor Thomson, the daughter of billionaire newspaper baron, Lord Thomson of Fleet, sued both the Marquess of Cholmondeley, a bachelor filmmaker with a fortune valued at over £100 million, and Christie's Auction House, for misrepresenting a pair of gilt and porphyry urns she purchased from Cholmondeley at a Christie's sale in London in 1994 for just under £2 million.

This article traces the provenance and migration of a painting by Jan van Goyen (1595–1656), River Landscape with a Swineherd, from the Jacques Goudstikker Collection and now in Gdańsk Muzeum Narodowe. After the “red-flag sale” of the Goudstikker Collection in July 1940 to German banker Alois Miedl, and then to Hermann Göring, this painting—after its sale on Berlin’s Lange Auction in December 1940 to Hitler’s agent Almas-Dietrich—was returned to Miedl-Goudstikker in Amsterdam. Miedl then sold it (with two other Dutch paintings) to the Nazi Gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster, among many wartime Dutch acquisitions for the Municipal Museum (Stadtmuseum). Evacuated to Thuringia and captured by a Soviet trophy brigade, it thus avoided postwar Dutch claims. Returned to Poland from the Hermitage in 1956, it was exhibited in the Netherlands and the United States (despite its Goudstikker label). Tracing its wartime and postwar odyssey highlights the transparent provenance research needed for Nazi-era acquisitions, especially in former National Socialist (NS) Germanized museums in countries such as Poland, where viable claims procedures for Holocaust victims and heirs are still lacking. This example of many “missing” Dutch paintings sold to NS-era German museums in cities that became part of postwar Poland, raises several important issues deserving attention in provenance research for still-displaced Nazi-looted art.

The international legal discourse on the topic of state succession in cultural property has long been dominated by the concept of territoriality—the territorial provenance (origin) of cultural assets. This traditional reasoning was essentially rooted in the idea of the European nation-state. In the last 50 years, the principle of territoriality has also become accommodated within the framework of the preservation of cultural heritage. Yet such territorial and protective approaches do not take into account the value of cultural heritage for society, that is, groups and individuals that have created or maintained a given heritage. This article attempts to explore the potential clash between the principles of territoriality and human rights, with respect to state succession in cultural heritage matters. In this context, it deals with some recent ongoing interstate negotiations on the allocation of and access to cultural property with respect to post–World War II developments in state succession among Poland, Germany, and Ukraine.

Digital technologies and the Internet in particular have transformed the ways we create, distribute, use, reuse, and consume cultural content; have impacted the workings of the cultural industries, and more generally the processes of making, experiencing, and remembering culture in local and global spaces. Yet, few of these, often profound, transformations have found reflection in law and institutional design. Cultural policy toolkits, in particular at the international level, are still very much offline and analog and conceive of culture as static property linked to national sovereignty and state boundaries. The article describes this state of affairs and asks the key question of whether there is a need to reform global cultural law and policy and if yes, what the essential elements of such a reform should be. The article is informed by the ongoing and vibrant digital copyright and creativity discourse1 but seeks to address also the less discussed, non–intellectual property tools of the cultural policy package. It thematizes the complexity and the interconnectedness of different fields of policymaking, as various decisions critical to cultural processes are made by institutions without cultural mandate. While this problem is not entirely new and is naturally triggered by the intrinsic duality of cultural goods and services, the article argues that the digital networked environment has only accentuated complexity, spillover effects, and unintended consequences. The question is how to navigate this newly created and profoundly fluid space, so as to ensure the preservation and sustainable provision of culture. The article hopes to contribute to the process of finding answers to this taxing question by identifying a few essential elements that need to be taken into consideration when designing future-oriented cultural policy.

The essay narrates the biography of a single art object—acclaimed in recent history as a “masterpiece” of ancient Indian sculpture—to invoke the larger spectrum of practices and discourses that came to constitute the field of art history in modern India. It explores the shifting locations and aesthetic trajectories that marked the transformation of this artifact from a curious archaeological “antiquity” into a national “art-treasure” and icon of Indian femininity, and later even into “a travelling emissary of ancient Indian art and culture.” On the one hand, the spectrum of travels of this object provides an ideal instance for mapping over the twentieth century the changing colonial, national and international stature of Indian art. On the other hand, its career also pointedly reveals the clash of contending claims and the politics of “return” and “restitution” that have attended the nationalization and artistic consecration of many such objects.

The author questions the concepts underlying ethnological collections of art and artifacts in the context of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Alternatives to traditional Western anthropological and art historical methods of collection and display of sacred Native American material are found in traditional Native American philosophy and practice. The contemporary fashion among curators for contextualization of displayed objects from Indigenous cultures is critiqued in the light of broader ethical concerns regarding the appropriateness of collecting sacred objects from living Indigenous Peoples.

Heritage 2010 was a state-of-the-art event regarding the relationship between forms of heritage and the conceptual framework for sustainable development. The four dimensions of sustainable development—environment, economics, society, and culture—were brought together in order to define a particular approach on how to deal with and go beyond the traditional aspects of heritage preservation and safeguarding. As heritage is no longer just a memory or a cultural reference, or even a place or an object, some deeper conceptualization is needed in order to place heritage in its present context. The concept of heritage is moving toward broader and wider scenarios, where it often becomes the driving force for commerce, business, leisure, and educational politics. Heritage is currently seen, or referred to, only through its cultural definition. However, sustainable development brings heritage concepts to another dimension, as it establishes profound relationships with economics, environment, and social aspects. Consequently, heritage preservation and safeguarding is facing new and complex problems. Degradation of heritage sites is not any more just a result of materials ageing or environmental actions. Factors such as global and local pollution, climate change, poverty, religion, tourism, commerce, ideologies, and war are now on the cutting edge for the emerging of new approaches, concerns, and visions on heritage. Thus, the “Heritage 2010: Heritage and Sustainable Development” conference was conceived to embrace a global view on how heritage is being contextualized with the four dimensions of sustainable development. Furthermore, heritage, governance, and education were brought into discussion as the key factors for enlightenment of future global strategies for heritage preservation and safeguarding.