Sucking the Quileute dry

This is the ingenious title of an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Angela Riley. She describes how various companies are now profiting from products using the name of that tiny Indian nation, made famous in the "Twilight" trilogy. For example, "Nordstrom.com sells items from Quileute hoodies to charms bearing a supposed Quileute werewolf tattoo." Riley says American intellectual property laws typically do not protect the "collective cultural property" of indigenous groups, so sucking in profit the way Nordstrom does, without sharing it with the natives, is "quite likely legal." So was slavery. Riley calls for a degree of voluntary profit sharing and involvement of indigenous peoples "in decisions regarding their cultural property." If the corporate executives making such decisions are sufficiently embarrassed, this may well happen in some cases, to some extent. Still, the mismatch between the legal protection extended to the intellectual property rights of corporations and those of nations and ethnic groups around the world is quite striking. Why should someone be free to call his cab company Karma Kabs and profit from all the fuzzy associations that name evokes, while anyone using the letters "Mc" or phrases like "and the city" and "in the city" faces expensive lawsuits? At least the Richard Branson brand lost that legal case lately where they were trying to establish proprietary right over the word "virgin" - preempting the Catholic Church.