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

Cory Doctorow doctorow at craphound.com
Wed Jan 30 06:57:31 EST 2008


An equally troubling circumstance is that of "half-caste" aboriginals 
who are sometimes denied status because the wrong parent was of 
aboriginal blood. For example, I know someone in Toronto whose mother is 
Finnish-Canadian and whose father was a Cree Indian. When her father 
died of a freak stroke when she was a little girl, she and her mother 
were expelled from the reservation because they were no longer 
considered "status Indians" for the purposes of residence and benefits.

If my friend wants to "appropriate" the tribal symbols of her father's 
people to criticize the elders who expelled her, she can do so -- 
*unless* a "traditional knowledge" paracopyright vests the authority to 
use those symbols in the elders' hands.

Aboriginal peoples have always borrowed from one another and from other 
groups whom they came into contact with. The Pacific Northwestern tribes 
of the Americas share a number of images, beliefs, and linguistic traits 
due to intellectual and physical commerce between the tribes and with 
Europeans over the centuries.

The issue of traditional knowledge is problematic on two axes:

First, because the "status" of aboriginal people is arbitrarily 
demarcated by conquering/colonial governments. Whatever a Cree band may 
think about "half-caste" people, their judgment is subject to a veto by 
the Canadian government, which has a shameful history of arbitrary and 
vicious enforcement of status -- indeed, the problems of status once 
sparked a civil war in Canada, led by Louis Riel, a Metis "half-caste" 
leader.

Second, because "property" is *just the wrong framework for 
understanding knowledge*. Trying to decide who "owns" an idea always 
produces a nonsensical outcome because ideas are simply too difficult to 
exclude "non-owners" from. Once the idea is known to someone not 
"entitled" to it, you can't take it back. As copyright and the ownership 
metaphor for knowledge expands -- comedians claiming "ownership" of 
jokes, etc -- we keep arriving at more and more ridiculous or 
ill-fitting outcomes.

Which is not to say that there shouldn't be a framework for the control, 
dissemination and disclosure of knowledge. While it's ridiculous to 
claim that Jay Leno "owns" his jokes, it's also ridiculous to say that 
he has *no* interest in his jokes. Ed Felten wrote well about this 
recently in respect of Robert Scoble's importation of his Facebook 
contacts, and the ensuing arguments about who "owned" the contact 
details for the 5000 Facebook buddies he'd scraped over to Plaxo. As 
Felten noted, no one "owns" the fact of someone's phone number or 
address or email address. However, many different entities (including 
and especially the person in question) have an *interest* in that 
information, and that interest needs to be protected by laws and norms 
that treat information as *information* -- not as a metaphorical 
instance of a piece of bread, a piece of land, or a handful of banknotes.

Do aboriginal people have an interest in traditional knowledge? 
Absolutely! It's just that some control over and remuneration for 
traditional knowledge be afforded to aboriginal people. But for so long 
as we use "intellectual property" metaphors for this knowledge, we won't 
evolve fair solutions that don't undermine the free expression of 
dissidents and excluded people, nor ones that resist subversion by the 
same companies and governments that have been screwing aboriginal people 
since the dawn of the sailing fleet.

Cory

Tim Cowlishaw wrote:
> On 29 Jan 2008, at 22:04, Fred Benenson wrote:
> 
>> More over, I agree that its a valuable lesson to learn about how to  
>> articulate digital rights with code in the right way.
> 
> Not entirely convinced by this - While the customs and norms of  
> Aboriginal society are clearly very different from my own Northern  
> European ones, I'm not convinced that such cultural relativism  
> justifies the use of DRM to enforce these cultural norms. The trouble  
> is that DRM is inherently prescriptive - It requires a person in some  
> sort of authoritative position to decide upon and set permissions for  
> the use of a resource, be that person a rights holder or a cultural  
> leader. Therefore, justifying the use of a prescriptive technology  
> with a relativist argument such as this doesn't make a vast amount of  
> sense to me, as it requires one to abandon this relativism at some  
> arbitrary level of granularity. An individual Aboriginal woman, for  
> instance, would potentially be denied the opportunity to use the  
> archive to study her heritage, whether or not she accepted the  
> prevailing cultural norms of her society; we end up with relativism at  
> the  cultural level, and prescriptivism (enforced by technology) from  
> there on down to the individual, which doesn't sound entirely  
> satisfactory to me.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
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-- 
Cory Doctorow
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