The USPTO has put the United States on record describing cultural heritage protection as a risk to intellectual property systems. Framed as a risk, extraction from the communities of origin stays the default setting of the market — and every cycle of it widens the wealth gap the extraction created.
On 15 July 2026, the USPTO's Office of Policy and International Affairs published a four-page bulletin on WIPO's work protecting cultural heritage. The alert carrying it named the subject plainly: the risks such protections pose to intellectual property systems.1
The Office led the U.S. delegation at the 52nd session of the Intergovernmental Committee and will lead again when IGC 53 convenes 16–25 September 2026.2 The texts on traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions are still open. What goes into them, and what stays out, is settled in that room.
Much of the bulletin is careful and, in places, correct. We do not contest that definitions are unresolved, that perpetual exclusive rights would collide with a time-bound system, or that retroactivity is a live hazard. We are writing about one word that appears nowhere in the document: asset.
An asset has a title, a valuation method, and a path to financing. An encumbrance has none of those. It is a claim recorded against somebody else's property, measurable only by what it costs the holder.
Across four pages, culture appears only in the second register: a limitation on industry, a restriction on use, a discouragement to investment, with entertainment, clothing, household goods, healthcare and agriculture named as the sectors burdened.3 No line asks what the underlying material is worth, who captures that value now, or through what instrument it might trade.
That is not a factual dispute. It is a disagreement about which column of the ledger culture belongs in — and the answer settled in Geneva will hold for a generation.
| Treated as an encumbrance | Treated as an asset | |
|---|---|---|
| Instrument | A restriction on another party's rights | A title, held by an identified party |
| How it is measured | By the cost it imposes on users | By valuation, against comparables |
| Who administers it | Governments and courts | A registry and its custodians |
| Remedy available | Litigation, after the fact | A license, before the fact |
| Best outcome for originators | A payment, in one generation | Collateral, across generations |
| Effect on licensing volume | Contracts | Expands |
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This table is the MADE CX framing of the choice before the Committee. It is our characterization, not a position attributed to any delegation.
The bulletin's organizing term is demandeur — a member state pressing for new, binding international rules.4 MADE CX is not one. The Cultural Property Rights Standard is not a treaty proposal, a legislative petition, or a claim against copyright.
CPRS is a voluntary, contractual, IP-compatible market layer. It creates no statutory right, asks for no legislative grant, and sits alongside copyright covering what copyright's subject matter was never built to hold.
The consequence matters. Nearly every objection in the bulletin is an objection to a mandatory regime: compelled payment, perpetual exclusivity, retroactive reach, government administration. Set those against a voluntary registry and they do not land.
| Concern raised | How a voluntary registry answers it |
|---|---|
| An outsider cannot know they are handling protected material | Registration is the definition. A BCID names the asset, its lineage and its holder of record. What is not in the register is not covered — the boundary is searchable, not interpretive. |
| Perpetual exclusive rights of control and access | CPRS grants no exclusivity and no veto. A Cultural Use License is a metered, priced permission — a commercial instrument, not a right of refusal. |
| Mandatory payment for publicly available material | Nothing is compelled. Public material stays public. A licensee is buying documented provenance and defensible terms, which is a different product from access. |
| Retroactive restrictions upending existing rights | The register runs forward. A filing establishes a prospective record; it reopens nothing already settled and voids no existing grant. |
| TK and TCE collapsed into one construct | Thirteen sovereign registries across six industry chambers. The distinctions are held structurally, by where an asset is filed, rather than argued definitionally. |
| Overlapping claims, or no clear group | Priority resolves by filing date and custodianship of record — the way every property register has resolved competing claims since the first land office. |
| Hard to justify under a mandate to promote IP | The standard adds licensable supply rather than subtracting permitted use. Making culture bankable is a commerce argument, which places it inside the mandate rather than against it. |
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Left column paraphrases concerns set out in the USPTO bulletin, July 2026. Right column is the MADE CX position and has not been agreed with any delegation or with WIPO.
Copyright covers the photograph, not the aesthetic. The recording, not the tradition. The catalogue record, not the object's meaning to the people it came from.
Those excluded layers are where commercial value increasingly sits. A model does not need the master; it needs the style. A brand does not license a song; it licenses an association. The traded thing falls outside the subject matter of the instrument that supposedly governs it.
The unit of copyright is a work. The unit the market prices is a lineage — which tradition, from whom, through which generation. $CULTURE is the dataset copyright cannot describe: not because copyright failed, but because it was never given that job. It was built to move works into commerce. Where culture appeared, its practical function was to license the extraction and leave the source unnamed.
The photograph, not the aesthetic. The recording, not the tradition. The catalogue record, not the meaning. The excluded layer is where the money went.
Founder's Note No. 09The failure is not restriction. Culture already has functioning price discovery: every catalogue sale, brand partnership, sampling clearance and training-data agreement is a completed transaction at a negotiated number between willing parties.
What the market lacks is infrastructure — no registry, no titling, no valuation standard, no path to financing. Where those are absent, value settles wherever the paperwork already exists, with publishers, platforms and intermediaries, and not with the communities of origin. That is not an intellectual property problem. It is a market-formation problem.
Every remedy under discussion is a rule about use. None of them is a system of record.
Attribution, consent and payment all assume someone already knows what belongs to whom. Nothing in the texts establishes how that is written down, kept current, searched by a prospective licensee, or valued by a lender.
The remedy the existing system offers is a lawsuit — backward-looking, expensive, available in practice to parties who already hold capital. It asks a community to prove, years later and against opposing counsel, what was taken and by whom.
A register asks something far smaller: that you wrote down what was yours, before anyone came for it. It is cheap, prospective, and it works whether or not anyone ever sues. That is the difference between a claim and a title, and it is the whole of the design.
Each is a private contractual instrument. None requires a statute, a treaty article, or a government to administer it — which is why they are running now, while the texts are still open.
The United States tabled one constructive proposal at IGC 52: a WIPO survey — not another catalogue of laws on the books, but evidence of how existing systems operate in practice and what outcomes they have produced.5 The aim was to supply the information missing from the evaluation.
That is the one request in the record we can answer directly, and we answer it in the affirmative. MADE CX is not a law and does not ask to become one. It is an operating market layer with a transaction record — assets titled, licenses issued, values assessed, custodians appointed — and it is the profile of the tailored, IP-compatible approach the bulletin says it prefers to a one-size-fits-all regime.6
The evidence gap the survey was designed to close is narrower than it looks. A working system exists.
It grants no exclusivity, compels no payment, reaches nothing retroactively, and required no treaty to build. If the Committee wants to know whether cultural property can be defined precisely enough to license, the answer is already being tested commercially rather than argued textually.
Every remedy on the table in Geneva — attribution, consent, a payment for use — is an income transfer. Income is spent in the generation that earns it. Property compounds across generations: held, borrowed against, insured, inherited, priced.
That is why the category question is the entire question. Treat cultural property as an encumbrance and the ceiling is a better royalty. Treat it as an asset and it becomes collateral. Only the second closes a gap; the first raises an income and leaves the gap where it stood.
We are not asking the Committee to grant us anything. The registry is live and the transactions are happening whether or not the texts ever close. But the framing adopted in Geneva decides whether the rest of the market treats what we have titled as property — or as a claim against somebody else's. Culture is property. The only thing missing was the paperwork, and that has now been built.
Yours in the interest of the race,
The next note takes the two negotiating texts clause by clause and marks every provision a registry answers without a statute. Subscribe to get each Founder's Note in your inbox.
Reported figures are cited to a primary source. Where a statement is a MADE CX assessment rather than a reported metric, it is labeled as one. Characterizations of the USPTO bulletin are paraphrase, not quotation.
MADE CX publishes editorial research and commentary on cultural property and commerce. Nothing on this site is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or interest, and nothing here is investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice.
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