The focus of this article is upon objects in museum collections where legal title is uncertain (“orphans”), where the owner is unknown (deposited objects), or where the owner cannot be found (uncollected loans). Museums may have little choice but to continue to care for these objects even where they are unsuitable to be retained within the permanent collections. It is argued that the current law in the United Kingdom prevents museums from managing their collections properly and rationalizing them where necessary. New legislation has been proposed that would assist Scottish museums. It is argued that all museums in the United Kingdom need new legislation that would enable them to manage their collections more effectively and to approach the review of collections and the disposal of unsuitable objects in a proper and balanced manner, acting for the benefit of the public.

Urban redevelopment projects increasingly draw on culture as a tool for rejuvenating city spaces but, in doing so, can overemphasize the economic or exchange-value potential of a cultural space to the detriment of what was initially meaningful about a space—that which carries great cultural community wealth, use-value, or embodies a group’s intangible cultural heritage. Development and preservation interests illustrate this tension in terms of how cultural heritage—both tangible and intangible—is managed in the city. This article will turn to Toronto’s “Music City” strategy that is being deployed as part of a culture-focused urban redevelopment trend and Creative City planning initiative in order to examine how the modern urban intangible merits of city spaces are valuated and dealt with in light of the comparatively weak regard accorded to intangibility within the available heritage protection legal frameworks of Canada, Ontario, and, specifically, Toronto. The currently underdeveloped recognition for intangibility in the heritage protection equation not only fails to equally valuate non-dominant, unconventional, or alternative iterations of culture but also falls behind the key guiding documents in international law for the safeguarding and recognition of intangible cultural heritage as well as in accounting for intangibility in determining heritage value. Without diligent inclusive strategies to account for, and consult, the diverse spectrum of groups, cultures, and cultural spaces affected by urban heritage and cultural city planning processes, a city’s development initiatives risk counterproductively destroying the precise characteristics they are otherwise seeking to nourish, create, and, even, commodify.

This article is concerned with the ways in which discourses of rights serve to destabilize indigenous logics when used for gains in the market. It does so through examining a Rastafarian tour group who uses their participation in the tourism market to challenge what they believe are infringed cultural property rights. As a means of commercially defending these rights, the group employs a discourse of indigeneity. In this process, they have gained partial recognition from the World Intellectual Property Organization and increasing acknowledgement from the Jamaican government. However, while the basis of indigeneity strongly supports the case of intellectual and cultural property rights, this recognition ultimately further identifies the group, and Rastafari in general, with Jamaica.

The recent reform of the Unified National Civil and Commercial Code will bring about significant changes in the Argentine legal system. The aim of this article is to analyze their impact in relation to the area of cultural heritage, especially in regard to the public property status of archaeological and paleontological heritage. Changes adopted—in contrast to those proposed, which referred to the issues related to indigenous communities and the protection of collective rights—are also discussed. The latter is the most innovative aspect of the reform since it involves a change of approach regarding private property and strengthens the regulatory powers of the state over private property, which might be applied to the protection of cultural property.