Transcript DELAMAN November 2004 - Welcome to the Max Planck

Legal & Ethical Aspects of
Access Management
DELAMAN Access Management Workshop
29-30 Nov 2004
Heidi Johnson (AILLA)  Gary Holton (ANLC)
Definitions
 Legal -- what people can do
 Ethical -- what people should do
Legal aspects
 Copyrights
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The right to: make, distribute, and/or publish
copies; perform/display publicly; make
derivative works.
Binding legal agreement regarding how
resources can be shared
Law varies in different jurisdictions
Archives must respect local laws
Who holds copyright?
 Creator
 Depositor (Collector)
 Archive
 Assignment of copyright among these parties
varies by jurisdiction
Purpose of copyright
 Protect the rights of creators in order to
encourage creativity.
 Permit commercial monopoly
 Note: copyrights are legally treated as
property, which can be assigned or sold.
Limitations of legal copyright
 Copyright is woefully inadequate for
protecting language resources
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Most formulations of copyright and intellectual
property law apply to individuals and serve to
protect individual knowledge or creativity
Yet (many) language resources represent
traditional or collective knowledge -- precisely
the type of knowledge which is exempt from
copyright protection
Ethical aspects
 For most language archives, legal issues
(copyright) are of little relevance (beyond
satisfying the institution’s lawyers)
 Moral or ethical issues are more relevant
 Different peoples have different views about
tribal vs. individual ownership of creative
works AND different individuals within a given
group have different views about all this.
Radical claim #1
 Language archives must respect restrictions
placed upon resources by creators and
depositors
 Why?
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Moral answer: respect for an expanded notion
of intellectual property (“moral rights”)
Pragmatic answer: without such guarantees
creators (and depositors) will be reluctant to
entrust resources to archives
Who cares?
 Why not just accept unrestricted resources
and let someone else deal with the restricted
ones?
 Preserving the world’s linguistic heritage is
not a 90% game

most of the world’s under-documented
linguistic diversity exists among marginalized
societies which may feel to need to impose
access restrictions
Access restrictions change
 Access restrictions must be maintained, as
they change with time
 Restrictions often vary with endangerment,
with the greatest restrictions occurring in the
“severely endangered” stage and decreasing
thereafter
 In general, restrictions decrease with time:
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distance makes content less sensitive;
people get used to the idea of publication
Corollary to Radical Claim #1
 Language archives must respect (and
implement) restrictions, but
 Language archives can't arbitrate inter-tribal
or speaker-researcher disputes.
 We probably need a presumably temporary,
highly restricted, "still-working-it-out" mode.
 Our systems are going to have to be flexible
enough to change, sometimes often.
Types of access restrictions
 usage-based

non-commercial use (this takes care of 99%)
 member-based
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indigenous community members
family members
research/education project members
Types of access controllers
 Archives
 automatic controls, e.g. passwords, time limits
 Depositors
 individuals, usually academics, usually accessible by
email
 Creators
 usually not very accessible at all, but possibly so.
 Community/cultural organizations
 Stable institutions with email, addresses (e.g. Koskun
Kalu, Kuna Cultural Congress).
 ephemeral (ad-hoc) bodies (e.g., Dena’ina Language
Advisory Board)
Radical claim #2
 Language archives must not allow local legal
restrictions to inhibit preservation of and
access to the world’s linguistic heritage
Balancing resource sharing and
access restrictions
 rights portability
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rights have to travel with resources
rights are managed by originating archive
other member archives respect rights of
originating archive
 distributed access management
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give control over who gets access to
depositors and/or creators and/or speaker
organizations.
the same restrictions apply everywhere.
Radical Claim #3
 Language archives need to define the terms
of the rights management issue, by:
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defining the problem space: it's a question of
who is allowed to use which resources for
what purposes;
providing specific tools for bundling rights with
resources;
implementing modules, protocols, etc. for
granting/restricting access
educating depositors and users
Some “real” scenarios
1) vetting by community organization
2) protection of work-in-progress
3) control-freak depositor
4) archive with undocumented materials
How is access granted?
 interface must be straightforward with not too
many options
 depositors likely to be reachable by email
 creators may not be
Some questions for the future
 commercial access -- is this just another kind
of restricted access
 what are the implications of P2P file sharing
for DELAMAN archives?