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Ch 6 Restitution
Thursday February 23, 2023, starting at 16:00 GMT = 17:00 CET (for 90 minutes)
Convenors: Saima Akhtar (Barnard College), Andrea Wallace (University of Exeter)
Youtube link: https://youtu.be/ybHKcb8ZGOs
Slides: tba
In this session we look at the legal rights and issues relevant to restitution and how digitisation can both complicate and create new opportunities for heritage and intellectual property ownership. We examine how physical property, digital property and intellectual property are considered (or not) by existing restitution initiatives at national and institutional levels. We also explore how digitisation itself can result in new forms of data, knowledge, and wealth extraction, leading to digital colonialism.
- Mathilde Pavis & Andrea Wallace. 2022. "Recommendations on Digital Restitution and Intellectual Property Restitution." Submission to the Advisory Committee for Guidelines for Collections in Austrian Federal Museums from Colonial Contexts convened by the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport (BMKÖS). Available: https://zenodo.org/record/7305104#.Y8GDL-LP3Ck
- Susan Douglas & Melanie Hayes. 2019. “Giving Diligence Its Due: Accessing Digital Images in Indigenous Repatriation Efforts.” Heritage 2.2, 1260-1273. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/2/2/81
- Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. "The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics." Available: https://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf
- Mathilde Pavis & Andrea Wallace. 2019. "Response to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report: Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Open Access relevant to the digitization and restitution of African Cultural Heritage and associated materials." Available: https://zenodo.org/record/2620597
- K Exell & T Rico. 2013. "There is no heritage in Qatar’: Orientalism, colonialism and other problematic histories." World Archaeology, 45(4), 670-685. Available: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00438243.2013.852069
- Usama Gad (2019). "Decolonizing the Troubled Archive of Egyptian Papyri" in Everyday in Orientalism. Available: https://everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/decolonizing-papyrology/
- Sonia Katyal. 2017. "Technoheritage" 105 California L Rev 1111–1172. Available: https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/search?p=035:[(bepress-path)californialawreview/vol105/iss4/3]
- Sarah Powell, Adam Moriarty et al. (2017). "The 'Open by Default' Journey of Auckland Museum’s Collections Online." Society Byte Aug 2017. Available: https://www.societybyte.swiss/2017/08/21/the-open-by-default-journey-of-auckland-museums-collections-online/
- Andrew Prescott & Lorna Hughes. 2018. “Why Do We Digitize? The Case for Slow Digitization.” Archive Journal. Available: http://www.archivejournal.net/essays/why-do-we-digitize-the-case-for-slow-digitization/
- Laura Sydell. 2018. “3D Scans Help Preserve History, But Who Should Own Them?” Podcast. All Things Considered, National Public Radio. Available: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/05/21/609084578/3d-scans-help-preserve-history-but-who-should-own-them
- Majd Al-Shihabi. 2020. “Using Open Source Tools to Decolonize Map Archives: The Case of Palestine Open Maps.” Presentation. Available: https://bl.iro.bl.uk/work/ns/87e6d3f8-9992-4508-b8aa-3bf618840f98
- Jane Anderson & Kimberly Christen. 2019. “Toward slow archives.” Archival Science 19.2, 87-116. Available: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09307-x
- Jane Anderson & Kimberly Christen. 2019. “Decolonizing Attribution: Traditions of Exclusion.” Journal of Radical Librarianship 5. 113-52. Available: https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/38/45
- Stuff The British Stole
- Access for Who?
- 99% Invisible, Episode 431: 12 Heads from the Garden of Perfect Brightness
- Hyperallergic Art Movements, Episode 32: Talking Digital Colonialism with Morehshin Allahyari
Exercise: In recent years, a number of ‘bespoke’ licences have emerged to counter the effects of content commercialisation in areas where it may be improper and reinforce historic power inequities and wealth extraction from vulnerable communities.
- Draft a licence (see examples below) and think about the ways you can design a tool that enables you to release materials in a way that conform to your personal ideas of how others should ethically reuse your content. (Remember, you can only apply a licence to materials you have created yourself. This licence cannot be applied to materials in which you do not own the rights.)
- Consider the following examples: The Anti-Capitalist Software license “exists to release software that empower individuals, collectives, worker-owned cooperatives, and nonprofits, while denying usage to those that exploit labor for profit.” It actively resists an open source status by prohibiting any reuse that aids or entrenches established powers and by allowing permitted users to release their own works and source code however they like, rather than under the same terms. Other licenses with similar goals include the Non-Violent Public License, the CoopCycle License, the Cooperative Software License, the Peer Production License, and the ACAB license. Another example, the Kaitiakitanga license, prioritises stewardship of materials and access by the community connected to it. The licence is designed to protect written and spoken languages to counter the commercial practice of buying up language media and knowledge and designing language programs that then charge those communities to (re)learn the language.
- Think in particular about what harms you feel are important to prevent in relation to your content or in relation to your general expectations about how your content will be used.
- Now consider the downsides of releasing your content under this licence. What desirable activity might it deter? Are there other options out there that achieve a similar goal without reinventing the wheel?