Mukurtu chatter
So the BBC radio interview and news article spawned a couple of discussions (here and here) about “digital rights management,” technological adaptations, and IPR in relation to indigenous communities. This is all great. It seems that many people were reacting to the BBC article (which was based on the Digital Planet radio interview…they used more of the interview to write up the piece.) more than the Digital Planet interview. I think that the way the BBC framed the issue around DRM in the online article, did, to some extent, drive the discussion around the question of whether the archive is or isn’t DRM. Which to me is sort of beside the point in technical terms. The archive does “restrict” access, but it does so within an agreed upon set of protocols. Which is different than a set of legal or coded restrictions that 1) were not agreed upon by the users or 2) cannot be changed without legal or financial penalty. In the Mukurtu archive, the “sharing protocols” can be changed at any time for either whole sets of content or individual pieces. The protocols themselves can be added or deleted based on the users input. Of course some group still needs to make the decision. We don’t assume some sort unified “community” or think that decisions do not incite debate, they do. The onus is on those involved (not the software company or a legal code) to decide (through various mechanisms) how to make the technology work for them. The cultural logic drives the archival logic.
The discussion over at slashdot was quite instructive for me to think about how the issue circulates in a more technologically oriented crowd–slashdot is a site for geeks, by geeks (or their tag line “news for nerds. stuff that matters).
There were 180 comments on the final thread! My software collaborators were thrilled we “made it” onto slashdot! The discussion moved back and forth around the question and quality of DRM–was it actually DRM, why would you make a system like this, we don’t need more restrictions–to some people “defending” (I guess) the idea of a culturally motivated set of “social restrictions” agreed upon by the community. Some of the comments seemed to be intentionally inflammatory in regards to “primitives,” “superstition”…etc. (ugh). I did have to stop reading for a bit and resist the urge to do some sort of cultural anthropology 101 intervention. What it does tell me is that *my* message about what “systems of accountability” can tell us about the *possibilities* for other types of information management and distribution systems (not corporate or property based) did not come across at least in the print article. IMHO I thought the Digital Planet interview articulated this better.
The discussion over at iCommons had some similar issues raised and good commentary about the problems with the DRM frame and the property logic that drives it. The red flag for me was the first comment “I don’t think that enforcing class, tribal and gender divisions through code is a good thing. It takes a heavy dose of cultural relativism on behalf of other people to see it as a good thing.” Hmmm. I responded with a probably too long post there, but for me this just misses the boat totally. This is what I think of as the knee-jerk reaction by the “information wants to be free” crowd. Any restrictions are necessarily “bad” — this assumes that all permissions are abuses of power, that everything should be open and if it is not someone’s “rights” are being abused. This makes “divisions” = bad; and ignores the social and legal divisions that drive the dominant understanding of “rights.” I clearly need to find a way to work through this argument. Other comments brought up the notion of social practice embedded in code and the thorny issues of “property” as they function to drive debates about content in these types of systems.
I haven’t seen any anthropologists comments on the archive. That would provide even more grist.
All of these types of discussions are insanely helpful for me as I move to “writing up” this material into a journal article. It’s great to have this kind of debate and feedback going into writing to help guide where (and which) issues really need to be fleshed out.
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Kim Christen
I am an Assistant Professor at Washington State University. I use this blog to keep myself writing. I blog about Australian Aboriginal politics, Indigenous issues, Indigenous new media, cultural politics, and other issues that come up. I made the icon above at Portrait Icon Maker
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An partial parallel which could help some readers is with the motion picture classification system in many countries. In the USA at least, “Legally, the rating system is entirely voluntary”, according to the Wikipedia article Motion Picture Association of America film rating system.
Flickr may be a useful model, or at least a good place to look for ideas.
Here’s the way Flickr works: you decide whether a picture is private, visible to your “friends”, or visible to everyone. The vocabulary looks like it’s carefully chosen to be positive or neutral. For example, “This picture is public. Change?”. Elsewhere, this feature is referred to as “permissions”.
You can also say something about the content. You’re given the option to “Flag this photo” and then you can indicate that it is safe, moderate or restricted. “Restricted” is probably the only negative word on the site, and even this is phrased as your description of the photo, rather than as stopping someone from seeing it.
You can describe how people are allowed to use your photos: “If you wish, you can associate a Creative Commons license with your photo, to grant people the right to use your work under certain circumstances.” This isn’t DRM, since there’s no technical restriction on people violating whatever license you choose.
All of this phrasing has you as the actor, not the web site. Nowhere does it say that Flickr will stop anybody from doing anything, although that’s what’s happening.
The private / friends / public model is becoming pervasive in “social” web sites. Facebook does it automatically and invisibly: you can see what your friends are up to, and you can see who their friends ARE, but you can’t find out anything (much) about the friends of your friends. I guess if you asked, people would describe this as “the way it works” rather than as access control.
I just don’t think that there’s anything in the way your archive works that has anything to do with DRM (and that was one of the first comments on slashdot). I also don’t think that it’s useful to refer to it as access control. My suggestion is that you never refer to DRM or access control again, and if someone suggests either term, dismiss it (“nah, nope, nyet …”). What I’d say is, “when someone puts something in the archive, they decide who can see it”. The fact that they’re using a particular set of community standards is more or less invisible to the web site.
One thing that may be contributing to the reaction is that in some countries, particularly the US, gender is one of the forbidden categories (like race or national origin). You can decide who to hire, or rent to, or any number of other activities, based on a whether a person has a tattoo, or is wearing brown shoes, or rides a bicycle, but if you decide based on one of the forbidden categories you’re either automatically breaking the law, or the burden of proof is on you. In the US, it might be legally questionable for Flickr to allow you to restrict your photos to one particular gender (but I’m not a lawyer).
Similarly, when you say “tribe”, people hear “race”. You might use some jargon as a distancing mechanism (kinship group? moiety? cohort?).
Graeme,
Thanks for the comment. I think one issue is the BBC write up versus what I said on the radio interview. For example, I mentioned Flickr on the Digital Planet interview but it didn’t make it into the show. In fact, we modeled a lot of our design on Flickr. And I know I never said “tribe”–ever! That was a British sort of BBC thing that then took off I think on slashdot. I agree with you on the gender issue in the US especially, it is a huge red flag and people automatically assume it is sexist if there is any division based on gender.
I agree with you the need is to focus on what people do. The archive doesn’t do much except act as a filter for the tags people add to each piece of content. Like I said this didn’t really come across in the news article, I don’t think.
It seems to me that DRM for people in the tech world is too associated with corporate control (again the point I made on the Digital Planet radio show) so it just stops people. There are access controls at work here, they are driven by a set of (changing) cultural protocols. Strictly speaking that is not DRM. I think the interesting point for the BBC and why they used that hook was that the archive provides an example of access controls that are not oppressive or corporate driven, but instead based on other principles. I’m not sure the term is helpful….but it does provide a way to help rethink the notion of access and “free culture” in a different set of terms.