[Icommons] Aboriginal archive's new DRM: Cultural Solution?

Wendy Seltzer wendy at seltzer.com
Tue Jan 29 16:54:29 EST 2008


Fred Benenson wrote:
> On the other hand, I don't think DRM is being used in the right way in this
> article. The use of rights management here seems to have a lot more to do
> with file permissions (I'm forgetting the right term of these) than
> copyright, which is what DRM is traditionally used to refer to.

I wonder whether you think it's being used right in my post, which that
one seems to have drawn from.  (I don't call the archive "DRM," just
digital restrictions):
<http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2008/01/11/mukurtu-contextual-archiving-digital-restrictions-done-right.html>




I’m accustomed to thinking of digital restrictions in the U.S.
intellectual property context. We’re told that DRM use restrictions are
trade-offs for getting material in digital form, but generally, the
trade is a bad one for the public.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive Kimberly Christen helped the
Australian Warumungu community in Tennant Creek to construct puts
digital restrictions in a very different light.

As Kim described when I met her at a conference over the summer, the
Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of
people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only
elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects may
be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldn’t be
viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the Warumungu
archive objects or images, they want to implement the same sort of
restrictions.

    They wanted an archive that was built around Warumungu protocols for
accessing and distributing materials (in many forms). One of the first
mandates was that everyone had to have a password so that they could
only see materials that they were meant to see based on their
family/country/community status.

Kim’s response was to help construct a digital archive with access
controls — ACLs based not on copyright but on the various elements of a
person’s community status. Your identity sets your view-port into the
archive; the computer will show only items you have permission to see.
The community can thus give objects context in the online archive
similar to that which situates them offline. As an object’s status
changes, the database can be updated to reflect new rights or restrictions.

Yet the Mukurtu’s form of “DRM” is fragile. Users are encouraged to
print images or burn CDs, which have no controls built-in.

    People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow the images
to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations or in other
areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu’s development was
that it needed to allow people to take things with them, printing and
burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the materials.

Unlike copyright-DRM systems, which fall back to the most restrictive
state when exporting or communicating with “unsigned” devices (such as
blocking all copying and breaking or lowering playback resolution on
high-definition monitors), this one defaults to granting access. It’s up
to the people using the system to determine how new and unknown
situations should be handled.

Because the Murkurtu protocol-restrictions support community norms,
rather than oppose them, the system can trust its users to take objects
with them. If a member of the community chooses to show a picture to
someone the machine would not have, his or her interpretation prevails —
the machine doesn’t presume to capture or trump the nuance of the social
protocol. Social protocols can be reviewed or broken, and so the human
choice to comply gives them strength as community ties.

One of the lessons of the recording industry lawsuits and growing shift
from DRM’d music is that community norms don’t support current copyright
law. Rather than fight copyright norms with bad code, we should learn
from the Warumungu and build code (and law) to support social practice.

Further good news: Kim says she and Craig Dietrich will be releasing the
archive’s code as Free Software.



> 
> And what's also interesting is that the software being used in this context
> appears to be a relatively decent translation (I'm assuming) of a literal
> interpretation of the tribe law. That is, if you are a female of a certain
> age, then you can get access to a particular document. This contrasts one of
> the most significant problems of traditional DRM (that it cannot anticipate
> fair uses) because it is so simple.
> 
> Ok, sorry for the long post, but thanks for the interesting link, Joy!
> 
> 
> Fred
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Wendy Seltzer -- wendy at seltzer.org
phone: +1.914.374.0613 // office: 617.373.7331
Visiting Professor, Northeastern University School of Law
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html
http://www.chillingeffects.org/
https://www.torproject.org/


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