>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [ Silence ] >> Betsy Peterson: Hi everyone. I'm Betsy Peterson, the Director of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress and I want to welcome you today to the latest presentation of our Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series. The Botkin series allows us to present some of the best scholarship in folklore, ethnomusicology and cultural heritage and it also allows us to enhance and grow our collections. Through-- we record all of these lectures and you will see them up on the web in no time at all. And-- but, because we do the recording of these lectures I want to ask you to turn off any cell phones. I need to make that obligatory announcement before we proceed, unless you want to be preserved for posterity. At any rate, I do have the great pleasure today of introducing-- uh, there was a-- >> [Laughter] I think it was going off. >> Betsy Peterson: Okay, alright. Today I have the honor of introducing Dr. Jane Anderson who comes to us, well from Australia by way of the University of Massachusetts and the Center for Heritage and Society and the Department of Anthropology at UMass Amherst. Dr. Anderson is a prominent legal scholar, a consultant and a well-known authority on issues related to intellectual property and indigenous traditional local knowledge resources. She holds a PhD in Law from the University of New South Wales in Australia and now is in the U.S. teaching. She also, in addition to her duties at UMass Amherst, also is an adjunct Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. Her work is focused on the philosophical and practical problems related to intellectual property law and the protection of indigenous traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. In addition to her theoretical work in this field Jane has also worked on a range of intellectual property and indigenous knowledge in applied projects with indigenous communities and organizations in Australia, Canada, Indonesia and the United States. Since 2007, Dr. Anderson has worked as an expert consultant for the World Intellectual Property Organization on a number of policy proposals for the protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions including the development of an alternative or international alternative dispute resolution and mediations service for intellectual property and indigenous traditional local knowledge disputes. She's also, I should say, done some extensive work with Molly Torsen from the Copyright Office here. In fact, producing this intellectual property and the safeguarding of traditional cultures for WIPO and if you can get your hands on it I encourage you to do so. Today Jane is also a cofounder and serves as Legal Director for localcontexts.org, which is an online platform for the delivery of traditional knowledge, licenses and labels. A combined legal and non-legal strategy enabling community attribution and recognizing culturally specific conditions for accessing and using indigenous cultural materials. Her book, "Law, Knowledge, Culture: The Production of Indigenous Knowledge in Intellectual Property Law" was published in 2009 by Edward Elgar Press in the United Kingdom. I could go on. I'm really thrilled to have her here today with us and I'm looking forward to some really great discussion. But, right now I'm going turn everything over to Jane and please give Jane a big welcome. Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> Dr. Jane Anderson: That was an incredibly generous introduction. Thank you so much. It's obviously an enormous privilege to be here today and I really want to thank Betsy Peterson for the invitation and, of course, Nancy Groce for all the organization to get me here, but it wasn't very far from Massachusetts, but still organization is required. I wanted to also say that it's a great pleasure to be back in D.C. So many of my ideas really matured in around 2005 when I was here for a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at the Smithsonian. So, it's really lovely to be back in D.C. and to see many faces that I actually know in the audience. So a little caveat before I begin, I'm seven months pregnant and I think what that really means is I can't speed through my presentation, which is probably good for you. It means I do get a little bit of shortness of breath while I'm talking and I'll take a lot of water breaks, so please bear with me while I do that, like now. [Laughter] What I've done is I've divided this lecture into two. The first is much more of a paper that I want to give just to get some of the theoretical and analytical ideas that I've been working with on the table. And the second half is I really want to demonstrate a particular initiative that I've been working on, this local context, the traditional knowledge, licenses and labels. So the second half of the lecture I'll really be showing what we're doing with that and what we're aiming to achieve through that particular initiative and I'll be much more informal with that kind of conversation. Okay so in the relatively short time that I have with you I want to do two primary things. And firstly, I want to sketch this analytical framework that I was talking about. My aim here is to reassemble and expand the contours of what we might see as underpinning many of the contemporary anxieties facing institutions with substantial indigenous collections. The framework that I will unravel draws upon four strands of influence. Firstly, my practical experience working in a cultural institution managing the legal questions that were arising in the early 2000's in relationship to indigenous collections. Second, my background in intellectual property law including especially critical readings of its history and the function and its modes of institutionalization both nationally and internationally. Thirdly, my attention to theories of decolonization and the conditions of coloniality or more simply, the ways in which colonialism is experienced and continues to affect the very possibility of modernity in the present. Finally, my ongoing work with and within indigenous communities in multiple locales on reclaiming, repatriating and returning the varied objects and representations of culture taken during the colonial collecting endeavor; especially and particularly these include photographs, sound recordings, moving images and written records and documents. Through a combined wave these strands of influence have required thinking beyond a kind of past, present nexus to imagine new legal and social paradigms that might allow for the more equitable sharing of these cultural resources into the future. So the second part of my talk will break from the analytical to explain and demonstrate this new initiative for responding to indigenous concerns about protecting their cultural resources and especially for negotiating and mediating a space for addressing these collections within cultural institutions. This initiative, the TK Licenses and Labels has been developed by myself and Kim Christen whom many of you may be familiar with through the groundbreaking Mukurtu Project. It is this project that is really the de-colonial futures that I mentioned in the title. The TK Licenses and Labels are a combined legal and educative initiative to address indigenous offered and owned cultural materials alongside cultural materials either in the public domain, which are often works and those authored by non-indigenous people, but yet remain protected by copyright. In terms of full disclosure this initiative has received initial funding from the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Today I want to show you the initial platform that we've developed to test these new TK Licenses and Labels and to illustrate how we envision these actually working and contributing to a de-colonial approaches to indigenous collections, those already existing and those being assembled through culturally specific frameworks My overall aim in this conversation is to add the analytical and theoretical thinking that have actually been practically put into use within the development of this particular initiative. So critical thinking in museum, library and archives studies have long insisted that archives libraries and museums are much more than just physical spaces and locations. Instead they are sat to the epistemological struggle where objects assembled within them can hold and confirm, construct and shape multiple meanings, which in turn can be reassembled from various vantage points reflecting different perspectives and contexts at different times. The epistemological struggles within cultural institutions are a result of what it holds, how knowledge objects were acquired, how they are arranged and what is actually made available to users. These collections therefore are always the subject of politics and always refract colonial modern power relations. In 2002, Ann Stolar argued for moving from analyzing the content of archives and of the cultural institutions to looking more closely at their form and constitution. Considering the way such sites are to be mined for content to support or refute a particular argument this shift away, this is what the shift away was from. The archival turn was a radical effort to encourage scholars to reflect upon archives in other institutions as sites of interpretation and meaning making. Looking more closely at the way they are made up and thus make possible and distribute central relationships between knowledge and power a larger picture about what, about these contexts as sites of knowledge production emerges. And so what the systems of classification signal at specific times following this quote from Laura, from Ann Stolar is really my key point of departure here. So, in this first part of the lecture I will focus on one central component that underpins the classificatory logic system of an archive, the author function. My argument is that authorship is an integral component for understanding how archives are constituted, how they distribute certain kinds of authority and how they circulate meaning. Authorship is foundational to the organizational framework because it operates as a core node in the classification of all materials within the modern archive. Of course, focus on the author function generally is not new to many, especially copyright scholars. The pioneering work of Peter Yazee, Martha Woodmansee and Mark Rose in the early 1990's refigured the historical and social effects of authorship and the integral role of copyright in the construction of this concept. My point is not to reinterpret this work, but rather to illuminate an area that perhaps missed being fully exposed to the light of author function analysis. That is the role of the author as the figure of exclusion and the integral role of copyright in facilitating colonial dispossession through the making and effects of this very category. My thinking in this context draws strongly on two kinds of de-colonial thinking from Latin-American scholars like Walter Mignolio and Annabella Cuiano [Assumed spelling] and that occurring through indigenous scholars and here Lindo Te Huia Smith's [Assumed spelling] work is pivotal. Putting these different works in conversation with each other and understanding my inquiry as being really positioned within a broader de-colonial project. My interest is in the role of the author within colonial archives as a legal and cultural construct that maintains very specific exclusions and relations of power. As de-colonial projects center in appreciation of the mechanisms that enable the coloniality of power this work considers how the relationship between copyright law and authorship functions as a means for maintaining hierarchies of knowledge production by reducing indigenous and non-European subjectivity and legitimating the ongoing appropriation of indigenous cultural material by non-indigenous authors. Closer analysis of the author archive copyright nexus reveals how in conjunction they work to reinforce the operation of colonial projects of knowledge accumulation. For if authors are the privileged and recognized in archives and the people subjected to colonial and colonizing projects are rarely named as authors, never given that status yet are extensibly the subjects of the documentation, then the archive through the legal and social entitlements afforded authors becomes a further sight of colonial control and dispossession. This effects not only how historical meaning is made, but also how contemporary, to contemporary readings of the archive can proceed. As a central locus in historical and contemporary projects of colonialism from which knowledge about certain kinds of people was produced and serve to justify how they were recognized and treated, reading the colonial archive along the grain requires accounting for the form and constitution of the content within institutions rather than just looking at the content alone. For how content is assembled and made available tells us a lot about the underpinning classificatory and colonial logics that continue to exert influence within modern institutions. So as we now know authorship is an outcome of specific legal and cultural developments and it emerged in a more stable form in Europe in the 18th century. Questions about its conditions of emergence show us its cultural particularities and also reveal how it became a tool alongside the written text to erase, appropriate, delegitimize alternative knowledge practices and forms of knowledge transmission particularly and especially those that were oral in nature. So just by way of illustration I wanted to, I've been wanting to do this for a very long time, I wanted to show the four country, the five, the six countries [Laughter] the six countries that were the initial signatories to the Berne Convention in 1886 and 87. And the Berne Convention is the first international agreement governing copyright. So I want to show, just by way of illustration, the amount of countries that came under these particular initial signatories and therefore the influence of these very cultural specific ideas of authorship through copyright then filtered into these different countries. It gives you a very good sense of colonialism. It gives you a very good sense of how particular ideas of copyright traveled into these countries and I really want to do a visual, data visualization of this in a different kind of way, but for the moment this is what I've got for you. And the point is that this history really matters. It really matters for understanding the current tensions over authorship that are spilling out over archives around the world. These tensions are emerging because the historical subjects of the archive are contesting their status within it and making forceful demands to be recognized as the custodians, owners and authors of the materials that document their lives, their families, their ceremonies and their cultures. And here I'm using the term historical subjects based on Subaltern theory of literature to refer to peoples who subjectivity was produced without their participation, so we have no legal rights to any of this material. The challenge mounted reveals the cultural contingency of the category of authorship and how ironically it remains a tool to enforce earlier exclusions. There is no legal option for retroactively reasserting the correct authorship even in its liberal individual singularity this is desired or even possible for the millions of works currently held in archives across the world. For indigenous people their colonial archive has a side of considerable anxiety, this is for two reasons. First, most of the material that records the lifestyles, languages, ceremonies, laws, customs and cultural practices of indigenous people is legally offered and owned by the person who made or transformed the intangible into the tangible form, the sound recording, the film, the photograph or the manuscript as the subjects of the images, recordings and writings not the ones doing the legally recognized labor resulting in copyright ownership. Not only do they have no control over the life of that material including in which archive it ends up and how this material is accessed and circulated. But, in an ironic twist in the era of digital proliferation they and their descendants must secure permission from the author or the legal rights holder in order to reuse any of that material. The second anxiety rises precisely in poignantly because these enormous collections that had been amassed are not how indigenous people would have chosen to represent themselves. Indigenous peoples were not informed that this material was produced and used to fit them into a very specific vision of the world that reduced their cultural practices and justified the dispossession of their lands, resources and cultures. Yet all this material remains with increased and increasing circulation of possibilities well beyond what was originally envisaged and of course explained at the moment it was created. Consents for this kind of new circulation could never have been given and the material becomes encoded with relations of power and specific entitlements and continues to position indigenous peoples, cultures, lifestyles and practices within a Eurocentric locust of enunciation. Through this construction indigenous culture is presented as if it only exists in dialogue with European cultures and within a European logic and value system. As archives are powerful sights of interpretation and meaning making, the historical refusal to admit indigenous peoples as legitimate authorities of their own cultural practices has had profound effects upon how indigenous and indigenous peoples' issues are contemporarily circulated and understood. They are almost always translated and mediated to make them more recognizable and legible. Yet indigenous claims within colonial archives expose both the cultural specificity of the notion of the author and the extent of the archive continues to uphold and endorse very specific rationalities of what constitutes knowledge production and knowledge circulation. While the integral relationship between law, the author and archive is foundational it reveals itself most clearly when authorship becomes a site of contest. Contested archives tell us a lot about the people who constructed them and for whose interest they have served. So as I've already mentioned, the relationship between authorship and copyright has been a site of productive exploration since the late 1980's, especially among critical legal scholars. This interest takes its point of departure from Furco's [Assumed spelling] "What is an Author" which raised questions about how the notion of the work as a singular entity comes into existence to start with and the role of this entity in producing a figure of the author and especially how this functions differently for the different categories of literary and scientific works. Furco asks, what are the networks of relations that are necessary for both the work and the author to be put in circulation together? Within copyright law the two most important categories that were developed through its long history were authorship and originality. While these categories were not developed automatically normal as stable entities the making of the category of the author within copyright law and by implication within the wider society begins most clearly with the literary property debates in Great Britain in the 17th century. While constructing the figure of the author was not the primary concern for the law, it was inevitably an effect of the law with a multiplicity of factors influencing law and its relationships with the legal idea of author to the wider society. This was as an individual and as an agent determining status and authority. Defining the category of the author was the means for establishing the legitimacy of the property and the work. In authorizing such property relations law necessarily affected the functionality of the subject named as the author within society. And it is the instructive relationship between the emergence of the entity named as an author and the legal institutional networks that uphold and endorse that same entity that are really important here. So the crafting of the legal category of the author that evolved through these literary property debates, hence at how this category from the very beginning was constructed as a vehicle for very particular political interests. Furco's interest, for example, is in how this category becomes naturalized within the context of new property relations and it tells us one part of the story. But, this remains part of a Eurocentric narrative that fails to account for the emergence of the author at the expense of other cultural authorities whose histories, narratives, laws, traditions and cultures were delegitimized as part of the network or relations of colonialism. The relationship between the rise of modern authorship and colonization is not just a coincidence. The author was also a figure of dispossession working to legally and socially reduce and exclude other cultural forms of articulation, expression and association with cultural knowledge products. Authorship was a central vehicle for appropriating the knowledge of colonial peoples. Indeed copyright through authorship operated in a corresponding way to how lucky in concepts of real property that situated labor and cultivation as creating the necessary conditions for possession altered the colonial context in which it was applied and imposed from Hawaii to India, Indonesia to Bolivia. The labor of authorship is in the cultivating and in the culturing. Through the rise of modern authorship there is a reduction in the capacity for indigenous people to account for their histories and practice. Moreover, with the increasing European gaze these practices become increasingly documented, the necessary and recognized labor and therefore authored by others, predominantly men with letters. The enormous collections of archived material that relate to indigenous people have only recently become a focus of more sustained attention even though they have been repetitively mined by non-indigenous people for important biological, medicinal and artistic innovations for hundreds of years. The inherently political nature of these collections has made institutions that house them increasingly uneasy. And this only is manifest not only in accounting for their establishment of the collections and in the colonial relations that enabled such projects, but also the claims of ownership, control and access indigenous people are asserting and which because of the specific legal constraints institutions have a great deal of trouble accommodating. In these new claims these collections reveal themselves as different. They're conditions of collection are exposed and we start to see the instrumental role of copyright and colonialism played out expressly through the legal and social entitlements of the author. For many in this room who also work with indigenous collections the last twenty years have seen a significant shift in how access to such collections by indigenous people can be facilitated. As the historical subjects of the archives stop becoming new users it is inevitable that challenges in terms of representation and access, control and ownership will occur. Yet the issues that institutions are dealing with today in relationship to the contested ownership have their genesis in colonial projects of recording indigenous peoples' lives. These contests can be traced to the unequal and unethical collecting endeavors, which through the development of new technologies like photography, sound recordings and moving pictures became more elaborate and sophisticated. These changes provided for the accumulation of knowledge objects at unprecedented levels. For if Margaret Mead in 1936-1937 was able to author 36,000 photographs and 33,000 feet of film footage from her ethnographic inquiries of Bali, Indonesia. By the 1980's the accumulation of such knowledge objects was possible at a much greater level. While we know few of the names of the people in the 36,000 photographs, we do know that they are authored by Margaret Mead and that her estate retains authority over these images as well as how they can be used. In the American Museum of Natural History in New York where this collection is held and managed, "The Margaret Mead Gallery of Pacific Peoples" clearly highlights who is the author of this collection and the relations of power that her authorship still commands over hundreds of unknown others. The legal entitlements here are explicit and the exclusions of the subjects and the informants are in perpetuity. So the technological changes that have occurred over the last ten years have facilitated an increase in the range of user to libraries and archives that would not have previously been possible. In an information age digital technology obviously provides an important opportunity for the further dissemination of material. Institutions have capitalized on the potential of new digital mediums for a variety of reasons including better storage capabilities, preservation, better scope for circulation of public domain material and sometimes more streamlined processes of ordering and classifying material. The new copyright challenges that revolve around reproduction and copying and exists because of the way in which digital technology has altered the ways in which accessing and communicating material can be achieved. With the changing information technologies material that once may have been very difficult to access becomes relatively easier. For colonial archives this changing technological environment produces a range of new questions about who should be able to access certain kinds of culturally specific material recorded through the legacies of colonial conquest. The questions are an extension of the contested status of authorship raised by those subjugated through this very category and affect both copyright materials, but also especially that which is already in the public domain. The public domain is not some aprioric universal state that now holds direct relationship with the legal frameworks that create the initial proprietary networks governing material. Moreover, expiration of copyright and transition to the status as public domain material only provides relief in terms of ownership and therefore use, but it does nothing to dislodge the authorship that critically copyright institutes. What I mean by this is that while copyright creates the legal construct of authorship in the transition to the public domain authorship becomes an embedded normative category. As the public domain status of material does little to dislodge the author from their work, the same indigenous concerns about the legitimacy of the legal, of legal authorship carry into the increasingly accessible public domain material that so naturalized how the relationships between the author and their work become by the time the work enters the public domain, at the current, currently 70 years plus the death of the author in most jurisdictions that indigenous claims find little traction. The romance of the public domain is that the public is assumed to be neutral, universal and all inclusive. Within public domain advocacy there is a monumental failure to acknowledge the conditions that produce the very culturally specific somebody as the author. And the person's documented though it's historically without the technology, without the privilege, without the information to make informed consents without participating in the first place nor able to consent to the exponential increase in its circulatory potential as having no legal rights and subsequently no social recognition as having legitimate claims to these knowledge objects. A dilemma is that not all recorded indigenous cultural material that currently resides in the public domain should actually be there. The public domain just extends a blindness to the inequity within the formation of these relationships and in so doing reveals the coloniality of power where in certain hierarchical power relations are folded into the present and normalized. Under such circumstances it becomes very difficult for recognizing and really understanding that some materials should not be circulated because it remains culturally offensive and inappropriate or still it has contextually driven community rules regarding use For example, in numerous contemporary Aboriginal communities in Australia photographs of deceased people, of Aboriginal people can cause cultural offense. Some steps have been developed to address this like the developed industry wide practice of creating a notification or warning that accompanies any public showing, on television for example, of moving images that include images of deceased Aboriginal people. My law and anthropology students are often amazed when we view something from Australia that has this warning. The normalizing of sensitivity to different cultural practices regarding indigenous peoples is something they cannot imagine happening in this country. Other kinds of material raise questions about confidentiality relating to who is entitled to see it. For instance, a film recording or a photograph of a ceremony may only be for viewing by one clan or community. It is not necessarily something that is free to be shared and used by others beyond the community. It was never free to be shared to start with and there are cultural rules and expectations about appropriate behavior. But, these have long been excluded from considerations around access to this material. They are not the relevant permissions. The information in the bibliographic data in relationship to a specific photographic item, for example, refers to. These permissions refer to copyright and those made by the author. New capacities for accessing materials seldom come with any new accompanying information for what the subjects themselves thought nor their names and this is a lost opportunity yet there continues to be important information about who the author is and in this authority over the representation is retained. The logics that produce the entitlement to be able to make the representations in the first place are carried into the present. The digital archival event, a turn of promise and potential does little to address the uncomfortable truths underpinning the creation of such collections and their placement within the organizational and indexical logics of modernity. So archives and libraries are predominantly, are primary repositories for providing an interpretation of the past, but what they hold and make available is always selective and depends significantly upon the founding logics and rationales from which the archives constitution and form is derived. Within the archive and library what the systems of classifications signal at specific times are the very substance of colonial politics, which continue to be refracted through the present. Law remains foundational to the archive and the library and copyright law establishes the central category of authorship and this consequently affects how ownership is managed and consequently access and use of the works. The modern author function establishes the proprietary trajectory for a work and thus also the conditions for its circulation. In turn, the archive upholds and endorses the authority and legitimacy of copyright law and inevitably the notion of the author. Digital repatriation within colonial archives does little to dislodge the embedded organizational frameworks of the author-owner matrix. If anything it normalizes it making the interrelations, the functions and the effects harder to see and therefore harder to disrupt. The paradigms of colonial control have ongoing legacies and institutional contexts where indigenous people still have to mount arguments for why they also should have rights to access, to copy and to control material that documents and records their lives. De-colonial projects encourage reflection upon the embedded colonial relationships conditioning modernity and in so doing expand the range of available readings of a specific event or site of knowledge production. The current contests and anxieties within institutions for the return of culturally specific material have no easy resolution. The legal category of authorship has very limited capacity for the inclusion of those that it functioned initially to dispossess. Defined equitable ways of dealing with these requires appreciating the extent that the organizational logic of archives centralized and operationalized relations of power and privilege between the author and the text. The established hierarchies of colonial control continue to greatly affect indigenous peoples' lives and their capacity to regain and reclaim what was taken. Yet with digitization and digital return projects there is a new opportunity to reassemble the terms and forms of authorship and cultural representation. There are possibilities for establishing more accurate representation that draws on and embraces the self-determining capacities of native peoples and communities. These opportunities certainly need to face the inequity of their past and how embedded in the present they have become. But, with thought and care new strategies can be woven back into the colonial, into projects of colonial endeavor to loosen its hold on the present and to add value to the collections. These strategies offer an opportunity for institutions to unfold their wealth of knowledge that currently lies dormant and in so doing radically expand our capacity for appreciating and understanding cultural difference on its own terms. Inclusion may very well mean that some material might be taken out of circulation, but the immense majority that is left can be decoded and added to in ways that only increase knowledge and importantly reshape the past, not as a concern from the past, but as a concern of the present. So now I want to turn to the TK Licenses and Label platform and I want to talk a little bit about what kind of initiative this have been designed to address and then also to demonstrate the platform a little bit and to provide a few examples of how the TK Labels in particular could be applied. It came about partly because indigenous communities are creating all these range of digital archive projects based within communities themselves. Some of these projects pull material back from cultural institutions, but it also-- these projects are also made up of indigenous communities documenting themselves through their own technology, so they become the authors rather than having other parties be the authors of their histories. And this is a very specific decolonization move by indigenous peoples to be the authors of their own histories. So one of the things that we found while we we're working on-- this comes from a particular project, a particular digital archive project developed by Kim Christen called Mukurtu whereas, while indigenous communities had standard copyright and they had licensing options like creative comments. There was a kind of gap in how they could actually address culturally specific needs in relationship to multiple community ownership, communal ownership and then also addressing very specific cultural needs in relationship to how much really should be accessed and used, these very specific rules governing access to material that actually do exist and continue to exist in indigenous communities. So in the name indigenous collections could be described as fitting into these four categories with works that are in the public domain being the most prominent category of works, then works by non-indigenous people and then were often works and then works by indigenous peoples themselves. This is kind of the current status quo; this is kind of where things are at with indigenous collections at the moment. We hope in the future, of course, that this changes as indigenous people start making their own works and doing their own representing. It'll still never get past the amount of works that are in the public domain, but we certainly hope that it will-- indigenous people will become the authors and owners of their works at a much greater level. So we decided to develop this TK License and Label platform to deal with the historical material and to deal with the future material that indigenous peoples are going to be creating. And to do that we had to deal with both a legal framework, but also an educative and social framework. We could-- the innovation of this project is putting both of these things in a same context. So, the licenses-- so this is an example of-- and to be perfectly honest we really did take inspiration from the creative commons framework. There's no need to repeat the wheel. They did a very, very good job in creating new ideas for licensing and in creating an alternative framework for licensing copyright works. And so we did build a model that was kind of similar to creative commons, but of course takes it in a different direction. So you'll see we had to develop images and icons to be used within our digital platform. So you'll see the majority, the little label is-- we're working with a majority of labels at the moment and the four down at the bottom are the four licenses that we're, we've developed specifically for use by indigenous communities. The labels are, and I'll talk about them in a little bit. The labels get much more to the specifics of what indigenous people want to have related in the public domain materials. So we've got attribution, we've got outreach, we've got whether material-- whether communities would like material to be used for commercial purposes. We've got-- the material is gendered. That material has certain kinds of secret sacred-- like secret sacred relationships around it. But, some material is actually for-- should be used for community use only and that some material is secret sacred. It's important to notice that these labels are in no way legally binding. The point of the labels is to be, is that so they can be added to works to provide more information so that user can make better decisions when they come up and find their material. So for example, if a filmmaker is going through, "The Folkways Collection" to look for a piece of music to use for a film and they come across a sound recording made in the 1930's of Aboriginal men in Central Australia that has been labeled secret sacred men only. That filmmaker is likely to make a different decision about whether to use that material in their film or not. And this is kind of what the aim of the labels is to do, to provide more information, to provide the missing information that allows users to make more informed decisions about how to use the material that's in the public domain. So all of these labels and licenses are sitting within this platform called local contexts and we use local context because we think that it's really the contextual content-- this is really the context that continues to matter for indigenous materials. It's where the original rules and obligations and responsibilities derive and we're trying to bring that back into a kind of more public space. So this website is about to be launched I think at the end of the week for comment. [Laughter] And if you would be interested in having access to this please let me know so that we, we want to-- the idea is to test this as well as we can before we actually make it function and live because we need to-- it needs to work and too get it to work we need people to try it out. So it's called local context and this is-- I would have shown it to you online, but [Inaudible] is bit iffy in this room so I've basically just got screen shots of local context to start with here. So this is what you would kind of come across and the local context is really a space to provide a whole lot of education and a whole lot of information. For anybody to use either labels or licenses there's a range of information that people need to know. What is copyright, for example, what is a license, for example? What is a label? How would one use this? How would one put it on a site? And so this website local context is where you would find all of that information, so it really functions as a kind of educational framework in which the TK Licenses can be generated or labels can be generated. And so you've got the choices at the top of where you can go and I'm going to just quickly go through that. So obviously there's a clear amount of information about what this whole system is about and the forum that we want to generate for having conversations about how this might be used, how it might be-- it might contribute to a different kind of paradigm for sharing knowledge. Importantly we have a section up here around decision making. I'm not going to show you that, but decision making is very important, how indigenous communities come to make informed decisions to use either the licenses or labels is really important and we want that to be clear and we'll be adding to that as communities develop their own decision making frameworks. Then we kind of go down and you can-- these are the licenses. Why would you use the licenses? It goes to kind of explain all the different licenses on another page, but I can't get that right to you now. And we do the same for the labels for when you don't own material, which is kind of the majority of cases actually. Then we have this kind of long what is section, which really is you know what is a copyright holder? What is copyright? And so it's providing kind of answers to these questions that most people would have when they come into this system. What is a license? How would I use that? What is the-- how long is the term of protection? How would I assign my rights? What is educational about this? How can I use it for the best of my community? And if you're an institution coming into it you have similar kinds of range of questions that can be answered for you. Then you get the license generator and we actually walk through all the steps to go to either generate a license or a label. Unfortunately for us this is way more complex than creative commons ever had to deal with where, because we're dealing with multiple ownership. We're dealing with trying to have-- we have to ask historical questions to get to the present in order to understand the flow that you need to understand the flow that you need to go down. And so one of the most difficult things to me was developing the workflow of how, like choose your own adventure, what questions need to be there to get to the end. And so this is a demo of what would happen if you went to, you chose a license. So these are some of the first questions that you would be asked on the road to producing a particular TK License. And so you-- you know you chose individual. I'm going to kind of not fly through this, but I want to get to the labels because I think that's probably more interesting in this context. And of course, if you chose the license, then all the labels disappear as an option and you've only got the four licenses left that the next questions will start determining which one of those licenses you'll be choosing. It's very similar to the creative commons model. Importantly you can only be the copyright holder of the material to create a TK License. You cannot create a TK License if you are not the owner of the copyright material and that is something that's very-- you know we have to very clearly explain within the framework itself. So this person is, for example, yes who's creating the license. [Inaudible] nation. It's really important that these names are put into the creation of the license. What is it that-- what is the content that you are seeking to license? All of this information will help us generate the license at the end. Do you want it attributed? Yes, so then it cuts out those two other options. This is what you end up getting. Your license, confirm, there's the license generated with the HTM version, the legal version. So that's the licenses. That's the legal side of things. The labels are not legal. The labels are educational. And know we are playing a little bit with the notion of fair use. It's a bit cheeky. But, we're calling them the fair and equitable use labels because there-- we really see them as a social intervention. They're providing more information and we think that by providing more information we're more likely to get people to make better decision about how to use this material. And we think by doing that we're less likely to get contests around derogatory treatment of material, which is really important from indigenous perspectives. So these labels are outreach, attribution, noncommercial, commercial, men only, secret sacred men, like restricted initiated men, restricted initiated women, women only, community use. We have a it's all going great label, which you know some communities really want because they know that people are doing the right thing in respect to their materials and they want to say thank you. You're doing the right things is exactly how our material should be represented. And then we have-- so the boxes, the secret sacred and the niche is the community use only, but all of that is explained on the site. And of course they don't look familiar now, but our hope is they become completely familiar and of course it's been very difficult to come up with images that then can be translated internationally for this kind of material, which is what we hope it to do. So here is a small example of what our-- you know how a label, for instance, would be used. And you know we kind of thought about, "The Curtis Collection" because, "The Curtis Collection" is a seminal collection particularly for Native American people. I think there's over 2,800 works at the Library of Congress. There's another 2,800 or so at Northwestern University. A thousand here digitized. There will be people in this room who know about that collection much better than me. Nevertheless, what's perfect about, "The Curtis Collection" to think about the possibility of using the labels is it all exists in the public domain, right. So-- and it's actually well documented as well. The-- Curtis was quite good at stating which community he was in when he took those photographs. That is not the case for much of the material in relationship to indigenous collections. The information about which community let alone individuals is often the missing information. But, "The Curtis Collection" is actually quite good to work with because it does have that information. So for instance, in this picture it's the Tesuque buffalo hunters. You can't see the image so clearly so this is the bibliographic data. And this is where we would imagine that the labels can get added quite easily. And so the framework that we're developing, the platform, can generate that label and then in collaboration can be put on the Library of Congress bibliographic data page. It requires collaboration. It requires dialogue. You can't just do it. That's kind of important. But here, for example, for this particular image it's possible, we don't know, it's possible that for the community involved, which we actually don't know which community this is that this could be recognized as community, you know historically community use only material. It has-- it's related to a ceremony. It's got age specifications. It's got initiation rights that go with it. And whilst it is in the public domain and it exists in the public domain this label gives a little bit more information about it that helps people make different decisions about when and how they could use it. So this is another example and of course at the moment with our, with the platform we can't put the label on the photograph. I just really wanted to see how that looked when I was playing around with this to see what it looks like, but normally it would probably be down the bottom. And so in this photograph we don't know the name of this man even though he was Chief in the Navajo, a Navajo Chief. I'm pretty sure the Navajo know exactly who this person is. And so the label to be used here is an attribution label. It provides the individual's name. It provides the community name and obviously any kind of biographical data that the community actually have that could enhance knowledge about this particular item. So the labels really are kind of aimed as an educational and social intervention. They're about trying to create a different kind of dialogue about this particular-- about public domain material. And really kind of institute different kinds of conversations about how we share knowledge and how we understand how knowledge is used between different kinds of cultural frameworks. I find that deeply challenging project to get my head around both because of the thinking about what the legal dimensions are with the licenses, but then also the potential for dealing with millions of millions of works that are in the public domain. My real ambitions here are you know are you know not to just theorize in this area, but to actually produce something that could be used and could become actually useful to kind of break from the kind of the colonial trajectory that we've been in for such a long time. And so this in itself becomes the kind of decolonial futures that I'm talking about and could actually change the way in which we engage with collections, not to make them-- not to necessarily close them down, but to create different kinds of conversations about what's in these collections and therefore actually add to the value of them. And so that's kind of our hope and that's something that we-- the communities that we've been working with, of course we're doing testing with a whole range of indigenous communities about these labels and licenses as well. We are seeking to do some kind of testing with institutions as well, partly because it's so key because that's where so much of this material is held. And so it's through testing that we'll see what works and what doesn't. Some of these things might not work, but it's nice to have them on the table as part of a kind of a dialogue and part of a new possibility or a new opportunity. So on that note these are some of the sponsors and the partners that are helping us with the TK Licenses and Labels. I should say there's only three of us doing that at the moment. It's a bit of an epic project. But' I'll leave it there for conversation, questions. [ Silence ] [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> Jane Anderson: Buwaa. >> So with regard to the licenses this is obviously still in progress, but who have you talked to within two different sets of communities? One say repositories on the one hand and then you mentioned, I think, that you had already-- this emanated from within sort of the Aboriginal communities? Within the U.S. context are there those kinds of communities, communities with origin who'd be interested, who have expressed interest in seeing this happen? >> Jane Anderson: Absolutely. I mean so this would require me talking a little bit about Kim Christen's Mukurtu project, which is a digital platform that is being developed for communities to insert their own works into and to manage. It's-- I can't do it justice. She'll do it, she'd do it much more justice than I. And so she's work-- I think she's working with over 100 communities at the moment with the Mukurtu project that these licenses are being built into as testing grounds. I'm also working with the Penobscot Nation at the moment and one of the kind of questions that they have is how do we deal with the kind of digitization of some-- they have very specific materials that they would like-- that they both don't own and increasingly starting to own legally. So they would both the TK Licenses and the Labels. We're kind of working closely with the community to develop you know what would that actually look like in a digital archive that's being established within a community itself. So for these TK Licenses and Labels at the moment they're only dealing with digital material. They're not yet able to deal with analog material. But, our hope is that you know as they grow in the future that they could deal with analog material. But, at the moment we're dealing with a kind of these digital reproductive frames. >> What about the archives, actually the second part of his question? How are those entities embracing this or thinking about it? >> Jane Anderson: Form what we've getting people are really interested. It's kind of addressing a need. And these-- the institutions that we've kind of been-- that is so far interested in are institutions in Australia and New Zealand, increasingly the United States. Obviously it's institutions that are aware they have these collections that are slightly problematic and that there is no real way yet to deal with that material. We kind of can either make it accessible and have the-- you know the community feel very not part of that process or not show the material at all. And so there has to be some middle ground in there. So the aim of working with institutions is to help establish certain kinds of communities with institutions to go, enter into dialogue about what these labels would look like, for instance. And so, I mean the reception that we've been getting has been incredibly positive. It does seem to be fitting into a need that exists, partly because of you know there is knowledge that these collections, they need something else. They need a different kind of treatment. They're not the same and therefore that requires maybe a different set of you know approaches or a different set of possibilities. And so for us this is kind of one you know possibility that we're seeking to explore. >> And it makes sense to test in institutions to see if it works for institutional needs. That's part of why we need to do testing in institutions. So, it's not just in communities that we do this testing, but also in institutions because this has to work for everybody. It can't just work for one group of people. It needs to work in collaboration. And so that's kind of why we've been building it like that. >> Thank you. That was really insightful. I enjoyed it. I have a question about if you were-- the example you gave of the lesson-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> So if you have someone who is licensed in the ceremonial song-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> Do they have to upload the ceremonial song because how do you actually figure out who's uploading what? So, [Inaudible] where everybody thinks they own the same story. >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> And they do. >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> And it's the same story. >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> But, they all dispute that they [Inaudible]. >> Jane Anderson: They'll dispute who owns it? >> So then do you offer them [Inaudible] isn't that somewhat kind of going back to the whole system-- >> Jane Anderson: Yea. >> And so how-- so do they give you the ceremonial song? >> Jane Anderson: No they don't. They don't give us the ceremonial song at all. We give them-- >> How do you then know what they've actually licensed? >> Jane Anderson: They tell us what they've licensed. So we don't want to be, like creative comments, we don't become any custodian of this material. That's not what we're interested in at all. What we become is the site for generating the license or the label, that's all. But, we need to know the information about if it's a ceremonial song because that helps us in the kind of final deed, the legal deed that we create that says what this license actually refers to. Does that make sense? >> You said, so people [Inaudible] talk about the two eggs, one becomes a Macaw, one becomes a crow. >> Jane Anderson: Yea. >> When you do you talk about the same story. Both claim that they-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> Own that story. >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> They-- each community could write to you and say I'm going to license-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> The two egg story. >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> And they both license it and then you're back to square one, right? >> Jane Anderson: Yea. >> I don't understand how you actually-- because you did the intellectual content-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> Of what people want to own, but if people dispute-- >> Jane Anderson: But, they don't. I mean this is the whole thing about intellectual property. They own the representation of that. They don't own the whole song itself, right. So two communities can have-- >> How do you figure out-- sorry I'm getting-- >> Jane Anderson: No, no, no. >> How do you figure out what [Inaudible] because unless they actually give you representation of the story how do you know that? >> Jane Anderson: So our job is not to determine who's representing who. Our job is-- that's not what we can do. We can't patrol or police the borders of our presentation. But, what we can do is create frameworks for people to help, to help make decisions about who is responsible. Who is the authority? Who owns that material? So, I mean this exactly the kind of questions that will be tested for within indigenous communities themselves. And so whilst I have an idea of how that will work on this system I don't have all the answers yet. But, it's precisely those questions that will be knotted out when we do the testing within communities themselves because it's a critical issue. I mean it's not that we haven't thought about it because we come up against it a lot, but we don't want to be those people policing who can represent who in relationship to the generation of the license because, as you say, it completely reproduces the colonial framework, which we're not interested in doing at all. And so I think we'll know a lot more in a year when we've been testing them with the communities themselves and seeing you know how much of that material is contested ownership. We have a license option there that is for multiple community ownership and that is deliberately because we know that there are multiple communities who do say that they have ownership of exactly the same song, exactly the same ceremony and we need to deal with that. And so that's why that's already in there. But, in terms of what-- how that will actually play out is why we do the testing. Rob? >> Rob: When you say that at present these are the licenses and tags are limited to digital collections-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> Rob: Do you mean collections with a digital surrogate or do you mean collections that have a digital record that you can put the labels on? >> Jane Anderson: Both actually. Both born digital and those that are digital surrogates of analog materials. >> Rob: No, but I mean what if you had a digital record like a catalog record of an analog item, why limit yourself to do those with digital surrogates? >> Jane Anderson: Can you say that again? >> Rob: Well, let's say you had-- let's say you have a catalog record-- >> Jane Anderson: Yea. >> Rob: For an item-- >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> Rob: Digital or analog-- >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> Rob: For which you did want to display the item online-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> Rob: [Inaudible] >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> Rob: Because it shouldn't be shared? >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> Rob: Right? >> Jane Anderson: Yea. >> Rob: So you're putting that label really in the catalog record. >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> Rob: Why couldn't that record refer to an analog object? >> Jane Anderson: No it could. >> Rob: It could, okay. >> Jane Anderson: It could. It could definitely, definitely, definitely as long as the record is digital we can refer to an analog. >> Rob: So you just somebody to put the tag on is what you're saying? >> Jane Anderson: Yea we need someone to put the tag on. But, this is the collaboration that would be required between the community who knows that that material is there even though it's not online. You can't see it. >> Rob: Uh huh. >> Jane Anderson: And the people who are working in the institution who know and have you know access to the bibliographic, the catalog material-- >> Rob: Right. >> Jane Anderson: To put the label on. >> Rob: Right. >> Jane Anderson: But yes and that's as far as we can get with analog material really because you know you can't go and tag all of it analog. That's just not going to happen. >> Rob: [Inaudible] >> Jane Anderson: Right. No, no, no, not at all. I mean-- >> Rob: For clarification. >> Jane Anderson: The digital really is kind of amazing what you can do with it. And so this has kind of come out because of dealing with so much digital material and that's kind of really our point of departure. But, it will interesting, very similar to creative commons about how they actually have to transition from the digital to the analog to the you know to the printed works, for example and again, yet to see how-- it's really kind of in emergence and evolving. It feels like I'm showing a real draft or something at the moment, but it's kind of exciting to be able to do that, so yea. >> I work in the Prints and Photographs Division where those Edward Curtis photographs come from. And I'm trying to think how we could respond to this new opportunity. >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> So I'm thinking that we might be able to treat it as an alert-- >> Jane Anderson: Right. >> But we would not be able to get into a situation where if one group claimed it-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> And wanted it taken down-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> And another claimed it and did not want it taken down-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> That we would only be able to do an alert to tell people what was going on. But, we would not be in a position to take it down on the basis on certain kinds of requests. >> Jane Anderson: And certainly the labels aren't about taking them down. The label is about providing that information that this-- there is an alternative perspective about this particular digital item, for instance, because we can't and you know we know we can't. You can't take it down. You can't take it down. And who knows what will happen in the future and what kinds of relationships will be generated through this process. But, the first process is to get you know-- there's-- and it is an alert. It is to say yes there's actually an alternative process or an alternative way of viewing this particular item. And I think in even having that alternative, having that alternative present starts a different kind of thinking for user and I think, that for me, that's what's really interesting. That sort of is the kind of paradigm changing moment where people think okay it's not just-- that here's just one way of viewing it. There's also an alternative way of understanding this particular item and therefore I might make different decisions as a user in relationship to it. And that's kind of what we really hope to happen, so yea it will function as an alert. >> Betsy Peterson: One more question. >> Jane Anderson: One more question. >> So I may have missed this and I apologize if I have, but for the extent and the public, the public this is-- I see how this fits. But, what about private works that you're not really sure in the future-- >> Jane Anderson: Uh huh. >> [Inaudible] is this appropriate to start labeling even works, for instance, a colleague who's a shipping photographer and asking this question out of respect and ethical reasons so that >> Jane Anderson: Yea. It's a great question. I mean there's no reason why they can't be-- these labels couldn't be used with people who already own materials. So many researchers, many anthropologists have major collections of their own that-- and they're the copyright holders of that material. But, many anthropologists also recognize that there are alternative rules that exist in relationship to the material that they have recorded and documented. And so again, we're hoping that this can start a conversation about you know where there should be an alternative added to that piece. We can't yet deal with private collections and private collections are somewhere else. It may be when I'm a lot older I'll start trying to deal with. But, I mean this is kind of the terrain that we've got at the moment where I've got indigenous communities, we've got institutions, we've got individual researchers or individuals who have certain kinds of collections that they're interested in expanding the conditions of how they're understood. So yes that's what we hope. And in a way individuals sometimes have, will have an easier relationship to be able to get to the labeling process than maybe an institution where you have the whole range of different kind of considerations within the institutional context. But, it's just an initiative to see how far we can go with this and how far we can kind of change the terrain in relationship to how indigenous collections are actually treated in the future. >> Betsy Peterson: Okay, thank you so much. [Applause] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.