Last
year, I had the opportunity to study the Harbord Village Oral History Project
from an archival perspective for one of my courses. This was great because it
exposed me to the practice of digitally archiving oral history materials, but
it also had me asking questions about copyright and ownership. Who owns an oral history interview? Is it
the interviewer who dedicates much of his or her time to conducting research in
order to develop relevant and appropriate questions? Or is it the interviewee
who is providing the answers to these questions? When these interviews are
created for and preserved in a particular library or archive, does that
institution then own the rights to this content? Or are they merely its
gatekeepers?
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| The Harbord Village Oral History Project "Terms of Use" page. |
After a bit of digging, it turns out that oral
history oftentimes both the interviewer and the interviewee, as co-creators of
the final product, jointly own the rights to its publication. This ownership is
commonly represented in the form of a legal release between both parties and
the institution hosting the records. However, the narrator has the right to
designate any restrictions for the use and dissemination of the interview
content (Romney 1973, 71). So that is all fine and well and makes complete
sense. However, this issue only becomes more complex when interviews are stored
digitally, on a website, for example. Piracy can occur, perhaps even
inadvertently. When content is freely available online, and in the form of an
audio interview rather than a written and published text, it is easy to forget
that there is, in fact, an owner. While this information is available for use
by the public, it is still another person’s intellectual property, and cannot
be reproduced or made available for public use by a third party. This is a prevalent
issue, especially today, as we discussed in class this morning. The convenience
of having information at our disposal online removes a certain level of
tangibility and authorship, which is how mistakes happen.
To me it seems that we’re living in an age of
information overload so using our best judgment about accessing, reusing, and repurposing
information can often be cast to the wayside. As Johns suggests, sometimes we
can’t tell the difference between a work that is pirated and the authentic work
itself, and the fact that we can’t (or choose not to) recognize the difference
is problematic (Johns 2009, 12). While it is not quite the same thing, in the
case of digital oral histories, removing interviews from their context and
their proper containers can result in piracy despite good intentions. What
happens when we download oral history interviews? Does this follow the same
copyright rules as downloading music? Donald Ritchie, Historian Emeritus of the
United States Senate, explains, “Downloading an
oral history is not the equivalent of publishing it. The Internet is a
distributor rather than a publisher and oral history transcripts are raw data
rather than books” (Ritchie 2003 ,81). It
would seem to me though, that additional
protective barriers to prevent misconduct should be implemented. This may
include a clickwrap agreement, which requires a user to sign-in to access the
desired content upon accepting an agreement to the terms of use in order to
mitigate legal risks.
While I do not own any oral histories myself (yet), I
find this to be a very interesting and complex issue of ownership, authority,
and copyright. It seems to be another realm of information access that is often
unintentionally taken for granted and this may be in part due to the fact that
the legal implications surrounding retrieval and use is not so clearly defined.
References:
Harbord Village History. “About this
Project,” 2013-2015. http://harbordvillagehistory.ca/hvhistory_oralhistory_aboutthisproject.html
Johns, Adrian. Ch. 1, "A General History of
the Pirates." In Piracy: the Intellectual Property Wars from
Gutenberg to Gates, 1-15, 497-518. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Ritchie,
Donald A. Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003.
Romney,
Joseph. “Legal Considerations In Oral History.” The Oral History Review
1 (1973): 66-76.
"When content is freely available online, and in the form of an audio interview rather than a written and published text, it is easy to forget that there is, in fact, an owner" - I 100% agree with this sentiment. I find that people believe because it was easy to access or because there were no barriers to access, there is no owner. Just because an owner is generously allowing access to their materials does not mean they don't deserve or have the right to receiving credit.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting take on this week's question (and a shout-out to my neighbourhood too!). I'm going to second Natasha in focusing on your claim that it is easy to forget there is an owner to an audio interview. I think people's general understanding of intellectual property is that it needs to be tangible (unlike memory) and that if it isn't in writing, there is no legal rightsholder. This idea of people's thoughts and memories having owners makes me think of our traditional knowledge research for copyright policy. In the case of oral history projects, researchers and interviewees sign forms so that there is a sense of ownership over the final product. In the case of memory and traditional knowledge being passed down, the fact that it is not seen as a product or project but rather a philosophical or cultural entity is another reason it is difficult to say that these types of exchanges belong to anyone, or have specific meanings. Add the element of digitization to that and it seems impossible to regulate appropriate use or consumption of this type of information.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of your comments.. Especially when thinking of traditional knowledge, Chrissy. How does memory factor into ownership? And your idea of tangibility is so spot on, and how this impacts our perceptions of ownership as users. The fortunate part is that in the case of ora history, methods are in place to protect the intellectual property of both interviewers and interviewees (though it remains a grey area), meanwhile for indigenous cultures, as we discovered through our research, knowledge is not protected by copyright law and the burden of protecting traditional knowledge is left up to these communities. In this case, I think that simply not having the support and the means to protect intellectual property is the most serious issue.
ReplyDeleteAs Chrissy mentioned, people tend to think that intellectual property needs to be in writing (or, even more specially, in print). That says a lot about potential problems not just for audio and video content, but for any new technology that doesn't fit into this imaginary mold. I definitely see this as continuing to be an issue long into the future, as new forms of expression are developed and made available. It's definitely a very interesting topic!
ReplyDelete