THE UNITY OF NON-TERRITORIALITY IN OUTER SPACE VERSUS THE DIVERSITY OF TERRITORIALITY IN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: A RECONCILIATION REGIME FOR SUSTAINABLE SPACE COMMERCIALISATION

The commercial and sustainable development of outer space requires a proper intellectual property protection legal regime. The international intellectual property treaties have not explicitly considered intellectual property protection in outer space in their provisions. Likewise, none of the five outer space treaties' provisions address the issue of intellectual property protection. This may discourage states and non-governmental entities from actively engaging in space activities. One principal reason leading to this legal status is the potential conflict caused by the unity of non-territoriality in outer space and the diversity of territoriality in intellectual property. This article will firstly examine in detail the contrasting feature of territoriality between the legal regimes of outer space and intellectual property. It then moves to argue that art VIII of the Outer Space Treaty offers a regulatory approach to reconcile the conflict. There is a self-contained mechanism that uses registered space objects as a connecting factor and the mode of "quasi-territorial" jurisdiction in public international law to permit the legitimate extension of the national sovereignty of the state of registry to space objects, thereby enabling guaranteed levels of functional intellectual property rights in outer space. An optimum balance can be reached between the unity of non-territoriality in outer space and the diversity of territoriality in intellectual property. As a result, intellectual property rights created from space activities can be legally protected by extending existing intellectual property laws to space objects, which has been well demonstrated in certain spacefaring countries' national space legislation. There is also a need to consider the legal harmonisation of rules concerning intellectual property protection in outer space at the international level in the long run.