Legal & Ethical Aspects of Access Management

DELAMAN Access Management Workshop29-30 Nov 2004

Heidi Johnson (AILLA) Gary Holton (ANLC)

Definitions

Legal -- what people can do Ethical -- what people should do

Legal aspects

Copyrights 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 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? 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: 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 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

rights have to travel with resources rights are managed by originating archive other member archives respect rights of

originating archive distributed access management

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: 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?