Abstract
As nations increasingly see “branding” themselves to be part of their national interest, pressure is growing to create trademark or trademark-like protection for country names, especially online. Although arguments for this new right come in various forms, the most substantial is the one championed by South Africa, which essentially asserts that some online addresses—amounting to virtual cultural property—are being expropriated by people who had the good fortune to live in countries that were early adopters of the Internet.
The argument that public international law should give special protection to a new class of virtual cultural property has a certain degree of appeal. It fits within three trends at once: (1) the trend towards recognizing the claims of indigenous peoples to prevent the uncompensated foreign exploitation of their traditional cultural property, (2) the ongoing expansion of intellectual property rights, and (3) the growing recognition of the increasing importance of rights in digital property in general and virtual property in particular. Rather than attempting to survey these three major trends, this short paper takes them largely as given. Instead, this Paper concentrates on identifying to what extent this claim of right is rooted in international law.