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

Michael Smolens michael at dotsub.com
Wed Jan 30 08:25:37 EST 2008


Cory - eloquently written.

dotSUB is working on several innovative programs bringing the daily  
life of Indigenous people to light using video.  One that is  
especially compelling is from PlanUsa, a 70 year old NGO focusing on  
helping young people throughout the world.  They are about to launch  
an innovative program in villages in Africa where one can see and  
understand in western and other languages, for the first time, the  
daily life and activities of villagers in Togo, for example, whose  
language is not even written.

Take a look at their beta version at

http://planusa.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/28645

click on the various color squares (links) which represent daily  
scenes of the children, the adults, culture and tradition, and  
concerns of the community.  Most of these links have already been  
'dotsubbed' with videos at that location in at minimum French and  
English.
The thought of DRM or rights issues at this level is beyond  
comprehension.

Enjoy.






Michael L. Smolens
Founder & CEO
dotSUB llc - Any Film Any Language
360 East 72nd St. #C3104
New York, NY 10021 USA
michael at dotsub.com - email
1-917-742-0158 - tel
1-646-403-9944 - fax
mlsmolens - Skype
http://dotSUB.com - website




On Jan 30, 2008, at 6:57 AM, Cory Doctorow wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Icommons mailing list
>> Icommons at lists.ibiblio.org
>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/icommons
>>
> -- 
> Cory Doctorow
> doctorow at craphound.com
>
> latest collection: craphound.com/overclocked
> latest novel: craphound.com/someone
>
> blog: boingboing.net
> vanity: craphound.com
> podcast: feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast
> second novel: craphound.com/est
> collection: craphound.com/place
> novel: craphound.com/down
>
> Join my mailing list and find out about upcoming books, stories,
> articles and appearances:
>
> http://www.ctyme.com/mailman/listinfo/doctorow
>
> READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your
> employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from
> any and all NON-NEGOTIATED  agreements, licenses, terms-of-service,
> shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure,
> non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I  
> have
> entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and
> assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and
> privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to  
> release
> me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
> _______________________________________________
> Icommons mailing list
> Icommons at lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/icommons
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/icommons/attachments/20080130/446f6c96/attachment-0001.htm 


More information about the Icommons mailing list