[Today] is is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a day that seeks to raise awareness of and support Indigenous peoples’ rights and aspirations around the world. We at Creative Commons (CC) wish to highlight this important celebration and acknowledge that, internationally, measures need to be taken to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests in their unique cultures. One measure, which intersects with our policy work at CC on Open GLAM, addresses the open, online sharing of Indigenous cultural heritage cared for within cultural heritage institutions.
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Source: United Nations
Reuse freedoms associated with public domain materials, and fostered through digitization, can create tension when it comes to Indigenous cultural heritage. Existing copyright law, steeped in Western concepts and values, does not adequately protect Indigenous traditional cultural expressions, nor does it sufficiently reflect or account for Indigenous cultural values. By default, many forms of Indigenous heritage or “traditional cultural expressions” (which may include secret, sacred, or sensitive content) are inequitably deemed public domain under conventional copyright law. One of the challenges is that the copyright system does not properly account for the ways in which traditional cultural expressions are created, collectively held, and transmitted through the generations. The copyright eligibility criteria, such as originality and authorship, are often at odds with Indigenous notions of creativity and custodianship over a community’s cultural heritage. As a result, it may seem that such heritage is freely available for use and reuse, when in truth this may not be the case. Permitting this level of access and use raises ethical concerns which must be fully considered
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
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