This article explores some key considerations around determining who should have the right to control access to, and benefit from, traditional knowledge and intangible cultural heritage. It highlights the complexities involved in these considerations by examining in detail the different claims to control by different segments of the population in regard to two case studies: Samoan tattooing and the Vanuatu land dive. It uses insights from this analysis to problematize the assumptions about the use of concepts such as “community” in legislation designed to protection traditional knowledge and expressions of culture, and it also reflects on what effect such legislative developments may have on the cultural industries initiative and the implementation of the Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage.

This issue aims to assess the state of claims over intangible forms of property, which have been expanding in recent decades enabled by Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property and other international conventions. The articles examine the nature and limitations of intellectual property law and related property-like claims over intangible products and expressions, and present cases from the expanding margins of intangible property provisions including analyses of how these trends are playing out in the Global South and in areas outside of intellectual property law. The contributors show how both expansions of intangible property provisions and resistances to these expansions increase the terrain of experience that is enclosed by proprietary claims and suggest alternative strategies for responding to the contemporary intangible property regime.

This article seeks to contribute to the study surrounding documentation and the illicit trade in cultural property by examining the uses of photography by the international community. Popular and academic literature, news reports, and online databases reveal three primary and interconnected relationships that exist between photography and the trade of cultural heritage. This article presents photography as, first, an aid for the protection and identification of cultural heritage and, second, as a form of evidence to support an ownership claim by a country calling for repatriation.

This document contains model legislative provisions (the “Model Provisions”) established by a group of experts convened by the UNESCO and Unidroit Secretariats which are intended to assist domestic legislative bodies in the establishment of a legislative framework for heritage protection, to adopt effective legislation for the establishment and recognition of the State's ownership of undiscovered cultural objects with a view, inter alia, to facilitating restitution in case of unlawful removal. They are followed by guidelines aimed at better understanding the provisions.

The Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Hellenic Republic (hereinafter also referred to as Greece);

In the debate about indigenous cultural property, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of the United States has developed and implemented an unorthodox concept of “cultural affiliation.” The act entitles Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations to claim repatriation of their cultural property—comprising human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony—upon the establishment of a specific shared group identity and a cultural affiliation to an object. The concept of cultural affiliation in the act replaces proof of ownership, or proof that an object was stolen or illicitly removed. It thereby amends traditional standards saturated in notions of property and ownership that have perpetuated since Roman law and allows the evolution of a control regime over cultural property that takes into account the cultural aspects of the objects. On an international level, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) of 2007 stipulates a similar emancipation of indigenous peoples' cultural property claims from notions of property and ownership. This article explores NAGPRA's cultural affiliation concept as it stands between private property and human rights law and brings into focus the concept's elements that go beyond traditional property law. It ultimately looks at the potential and limits of the concept from an international perspective as a standard for other countries that consider implementation of UNDRIP's provisions on indigenous, tangible, movable cultural property.

Despite remaining the most iconic and highly valorized metrical technology of the entire, now globally universalized, project of zoological and botanical taxonomy, very little attention has been given to highlighting the pivotal role that type specimens also play in constructing and disciplining contemporary relations to living property. Building on my earlier work on the relationship between biological classification and regulation,1 this article provides an overdue analysis of this technology's significance in introducing deposition, priority of publication, and authorship as the key conceptual and functional mechanisms not only of taxonomic classification, but also of the ascendant system for prosecuting rights to ownership of biological novelties in the contemporary era: the Euro-American system of intellectual property law.

The conservation of historic buildings depends on their physical maintenance as much as it depends upon their protection against external threats resulting from economic forces, the political climate, and human interference. Although physical conservation is what keeps the buildings standing, protecting buildings from these external threats can be considered more important because, without such protection, the buildings might not survive for any maintenance to be performed. To achieve the envisaged protection, proper management techniques are required. This article draws management inspirations from the unique and long-enduring tradition of the Islamic waqf, as practiced in the historic Stone Town of Zanzibar, now a World Heritage Site. The structure of waqf management is examined, along with aspects of finance and building maintenance. It was found that the ability of a management system to evolve according to prevailing conditions can be an effective shield against the external threats mentioned here.

The Swiss Federal Council and the Government of the Hellenic Republic (hereinafter ‘the Parties’) in application of the November 14, 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, to which both countries are a party, and in pursuit of relevant applicable provisions at the Parties, in consideration that theft, looting and the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property representing harm to the cultural heritage of mankind, endeavoring to make a contribution to maintain and secure cultural heritage and to prohibit and prevent the illegal transfer of cultural property, in the belief that cooperation between both countries may constitute an important contribution in this regard, endeavoring to ease the repatriation of illicitly imported, exported and having its ownership illegally transferred cultural property and to strengthen contacts between both countries with regard to cultural exchanges, have agreed as follows.

This article situates the discussion of illicit trafficking in antiquities in the context of the relationship between the U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security. The main argument is that U.S. cultural heritage policy is part of a broader agenda of political discourse that links matters of heritage to wider concerns of security. If the underlying goal of the U.S. State Department is mutual understanding through open dialogue, how can initiatives that focus on the criminal networks and security, efforts tackled by the Department of Homeland Security, contribute to building a positive image for the United States abroad? Here I explore strategic aspects of U.S. cultural policies and federally supported programs aimed at mitigating against the illicit trade in antiquities as part of building and maintaining cultural relations.

While practitioners of the legal and art and culture industries have traditionally believed their businesses to be independent of the other, the escalating battle over the repatriation of cultural property teaches otherwise. The antiquities market has flourished despite the increase in litigation surrounding some works and the number of works repatriated in recent years, making interdisciplinary study of the market more relevant and necessary than ever. This study establishes that the number of antiquities sold with legally- significant provenance information is steadily increasing as a result of the legal environment. Also, these objects are less risky and therefore sell for higher prices than works with no recorded history of ownership. Finally, evidence indicates that the occurrence of a legal event causes a slight, short drop in the market, followed by a significant rise in prices for the objects with reliable provenance information. In the end, the auction market for Italian antiquities is inexorably linked to activities that have ramifications for the legality of collecting these works.

This article analyzes how intangible cultural expressions are re-scripted as national intellectual and cultural property in postcolonial nations such as Indonesia. The mixing of intellectual and cultural property paradigms to frame folkloric art practices as national possessions, termed “intangible property nationalism,” is assessed through consideration of Indonesia's 2002 copyright law, UNESCO heritage discourse, and the tutoring of ASEAN officials to use intellectual and cultural property rhetoric to defend national cultural resources. The article considers how legal assumptions are rebuffed by Indonesian regional artists and artisans who do not view their local knowledge and practices as property subject to exclusive claims by individuals or corporate groups, including the state. Producers' limited claims on authority over cultural expressions such as music, drama, puppetry, mythology, dance, and textiles contrast with Indonesian officials' anxieties over cultural theft by foreigners, especially in Malaysia. The case suggests new nationalist uses for heritage claims in postcolonial states.

The archaeological heritage is an essential element which defines the oldness and originality of culture, history and traditions of every nation, state or cultural space in relation to other nations, states or ethno-cultural spaces. Every nation has the obligation to preserve its cultural goods and to valorize it for the benefit of the entire humanity.

This article addresses the current international debate on the protection of cultural goods. Whereas some groups (such as indigenous peoples) are arguing for the creation of cultural property rights analogous to classic intellectual property rights such as patent and copyright, most industrialized countries advocate to keep cultural goods within the public domain. In this article, we develop an economic perspective based on identity and clarify the question of which cultural goods should be protected, regulated, or left in the public domain. We conclude that protection based on the concept of identity is required for a very limited scope of cultural goods.

Traditional culture and marine ecosystems are two important resources that are disappearing at alarming rates worldwide. Islands are places where culture and the marine environment are intertwined and offer the best locales to address this threat. Disasters such as shipwrecks and oil spills damage both culture and the environment, yet the legal system does not permit full recovery. This research advances a new tort theory of cultural and ecosystem damage to compensate victims in marine damage cases. Specifically this research investigates theories of recovery in the Federated States of Micronesia since Micronesia is in an ideal position to recognize this new damage theory. Micronesia can help establish precedents that other jurisdictions can follow to help preserve the culture and the marine ecosystems upon which they rely.

This article documents the practices of pharmaceutical creativity in Ayurveda, focusing in particular on how practitioners appropriate multiple sources to innovate medical knowledge. Drawing on research in linguistic anthropology on the social circulation of discourse—a process called entextualization—I describe how the ways in which Ayurveda practitioners innovate medical knowledge confounds the dichotomous logic of intellectual property (IP) rights discourse, which opposes traditional collective knowledge and modern individual innovation. While it is clear that these categories do not comprehend the complex nature of creativity in Ayurveda, I also use the concept of entextualization to describe how recent historical shifts in the circulation of discourse have caused a partial entailment of this opposition between the individual and the collectivity. Ultimately, I argue that the method exemplified in this article of tracking the social circulation of medical discourse highlights both the empirical complexity of so-called traditional creativity, and the politics of imposing the categories of IP rights discourse upon that creativity, situated as it often is, at the margins of the global economy.

Abstract: This article provides one of the first presentations of the Law of the Republic of Moldova on Archaeological Heritage Preservation recently approved by the Moldovan Parliament. Since 1993, Moldova has had a general law on monument preservation, but the part on archaeological heritage was poorly developed. The new law is the first of its kind in Moldova and was established according to the principles of the European and International Conventions signed in recent years by the Republic of Moldova. This law opens new avenues for Moldovan society to improve the situation in of its archaeological heritage, specifically to fight the black market in archaeology and illegal trafficking of antiquities.

The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage specifies that communities are to be full partners in efforts to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage. Yet the notion of safeguarding has been complicated by the politics and mechanisms of digital circulation. Based on fieldwork in British Columbia and Thailand, I show that community-based productions of multimedia aimed at documenting, transmitting, and revitalizing intangible heritage are productive spaces in which local cultural property rights discourses are initiated and articulated. I argue that digital heritage initiatives can support decision making about the circulation—or restriction—of digital cultural heritage while drawing attention to the complexities of safeguarding heritage in the digital age.

In his article, “The Value and Valuation of Maritime Cultural Heritage”, Stefan Claesson discusses methods by which the relative or absolute value of submerged cultural sites like shipwrecks might be established, to provide rational bases for decisions about their management. He emphasizes systems used in ecosystem valuation, notably an average individual's projected “willingness to pay” (WTP) to preserve something and “willingness to accept” (WTA) its loss. He suggests that systems to apply such measurement devices be built into things like the procedures for addressing impacts on historic properties under Section 106 of the U.S. National Historic Preservation Act.