An Analysis of Issues Arising from the Commercialization of Remote Sensing Activities

The pursuit of space technology in remote sensing has expanded itself from the confinements of the government bodies to private players in recent years, not only because of the large amount of capital necessary to fund space programmes but also due to the ever widening scope of its applications. Therefore, the commercialization calls for a certain protection of commercial interests in order to provide incentives for further developments in that direction. This paper, thereby, shall attempt to demonstrate that copyright protection of enhanced remote sensing data is vital and will serve the divergent needs of both industrialized and developing nations. The paper will carve an argument in favour of a space IPR regime, wherein rules can be improved while concepts can balance various competing interests, thereby establishing perspective of such efforts to forge international space cooperation among various legal and economic systems. The paper discusses the existing legal mechanisms and their limitations in remote sensing market, with a comparative assessment of copyright provisions in various space-faring nations. Further, the paper elaborates on the Indian IPR perspectives and proves that that legal provisions in India are not yet specific enough to provide protection to its highly active remote sensing programme. Finally the paper concludes that protection of commercial remote sensing end-products is not adequately achieved through available legal international instruments, and argues that an international cooperation is essential in making an effort to this end.