Cultural Heritage as Legal Resistance: Traditional Expressions, Corporate Trademark Hegemony, and the Crisis of Social Trust in the Digital Economy
Frans Rian

Universitas Terbuka

Abstract

The first-instance judgment delivered by the Suzhou Intermediate People^s Court on 29 June 2026, ordering Molly Tea to pay RMB 10.3 million to Louis Vuitton over four-petal device marks, generated a dispute that reached beyond ordinary trademark similarity. This study examined the structural tension between corporate trademark rights and communal Traditional Cultural Expressions in a digital economy where brands, evidence, and public controversy moved rapidly across borders and platforms. A socio-legal and comparative method was used to read the Molly Tea dispute against Indonesian copyright, trademark, and Communal Intellectual Property rules, international trademark obligations, and recent scholarship on heritage governance and digital trust. The study found that Indonesian law was not devoid of implementing protection: Government Regulation No. 56 of 2022 had established recording, defensive protection, a national information system, community-linked safeguards, and rules on attribution, permission, and benefit sharing. The principal weakness instead lay in procedural interoperability. Communal cultural records were not structurally connected to trademark examination, community notice, fast legal response, or cross-border evidence. The Molly Tea dispute, which remained under appeal, also showed that historical cultural ancestry did not automatically defeat a trademark protecting a specific source-identifying configuration. The paper therefore proposed a human-in-the-loop KIK-Trademark Interoperability Protocol combining provenance-aware registries, artificial-intelligence-assisted similarity alerts, community notice, multi-stakeholder review, reasoned audit logs, and platform transparency. Technological moderation was treated as procedural infrastructure for collective legal response rather than automated adjudication.

Keywords: Communal Intellectual Property, Digital Economy, Traditional Cultural Expressions, Well-Known Mark Doctrine

Topic: Technological Moderation for Collective Legal Response (Legal Innovation- Collaborative Regulation- Technology and Law)