[xenobioticants]

That automatically means no company can lay claim to stuff in space. When you read that Denmark, Russia, Norway etc. are laying claim to the North Pole (and more importantly, the oil underneath it), it pretty much means they are laying claim so they can offer the drilling rights to company X. However, since no one 'owns' space, it is impossible to grant rights. This does not mean that everyone can randomly lay claim to stuff in space, it means no one can. Although since no one can really effectively enforce the 'no-claim' part, there's no one to stop companies from doing so.

It'll get extremely interesting when a company of country A returns an extremely rare very useful element. Country A will of course lay claim to it, but according to the Outer Space Treaty all space exploration is done 'for the benefit of mankind', so other countries would be able to claim this extremely rare element (or its benefits) must be shared. That'd be hell of an interesting international law case.

[wayn3]

There is an international agreement that regulates how ownership in space works. This Week In Startups had a guest who explains it.

It somewhat amounts to "whoever got there first wins".

[xenobioticants]

After reading up on this: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/spacelaw.htm...

It seems that the current US position (who will probably be the first to start large scale mining) is that the resource site itself will never be owned but that labor attaches ownership to the ore. As said on the site, this still doesn't deal with when a singular deposit of an element exists and how access would be shared.

Another interesting point that's raised is that if an asteroid is entirely consumed by mining, does that count as 'appropriation'?

Man the next 100 years are gonna be a reaaaallly interesting time for lawyers..