Beyond Earth: Rethinking Intellectual Property Jurisdiction And Enforcement In Outer Space
- IJLLR Journal
- 54 minutes ago
- 1 min read
Chandramani Bhaskar, ILS Law College, Pune
ABSTRACT
Intellectual property law is built on the assumption that legal rights stop at a border. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are granted, held, and enforced within the territory of the state that recognises them, yet the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 rules out exactly the kind of territorial claim on which that system depends. This paper traces how states, space agencies, and international institutions have tried to reconcile these two regimes since the start of the Space Age, from the deeming provision added to United States patent law in 1990 to Article 21 of the International Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement. It then turns to the commercial pressures widening the gap: resource-extraction statutes in the United States and Luxembourg that say nothing about intellectual property, an Artemis Accords framework that defers the question to bilateral side-agreements, and an enforcement doctrine, illustrated by Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., that resists any extension of national IP law beyond a country's borders. A dedicated section examines India as a case study of a major spacefaring state whose Space Policy of 2023 and pending Space Activities Bill still leave IP ownership and licensing largely unaddressed. The paper argues that a patchwork of unilateral deeming fictions cannot support an era of shared lunar bases, private mining ventures, and orbital manufacturing, and proposes a coordinated response built around the registry-jurisdiction principle already present in Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty, model IP annexes for mission agreements, and a specialised arbitration track for space- related IP disputes.
