http://alex.golub.name/res/golub2004.pdf

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My first thought was not “why doesn’t she use CC licensing?” but “why the hell does she get to decide where the pictures are reproduced rather than the people in them?”

Of course, the untanglement of the ethics of image use can take on ironic new twists:

Government lawyer Sean Lane argued that releasing pictures, even if faces and other features are obscured, would violate Geneva Convention rules on prisoner treatment by subjecting detainees to additional humiliation or embarrassment. He said the emotional wounds would be reopened because detainees could identify themselves and because the public would learn their identities.

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But then again my informants involve 1) hypersuccessful and tireless indigenous negotiators and 2) a mining multinational whose lawyers scrutinized my informed consent sheet before people began signing them. So I have a different relation to this. I suspect who you did fieldwork with will shape a lot of your outlook on this.

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As for the Canadian scene specifically, a couple of examples might convey something of the tone surrounding copyrights and creative works. The only request made of me by the Band Council in the community in which I ultimately did my fieldwork was that I give them copyright of my dissertation. After some discussion, we agreed that we would share copyright … they retained ownership of stories and spoken data (as did the actual storyteller or speaker) and I retained rights to the style, ideas, methods, and overall presentation. There was general agreement of the value in me keeping some of the copyright so as to maintain at least the appearance of research objectivity (ie that I was not somehow simply authoring what their ideas). (What interests me about this request is the extent to which the community I work in seems to know its rights regarding privacy and control of information – and insists upon this as a condition of their participation in the research of an outsider.)

Perhaps more to the point, the recent debate over the choice of the logo for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia, brought up all sorts of questions surrounding who owns native culture and aboriginal symbols, what non-native artists can do with such iconography, and indeed, what is a unifying symbol for all of Canada. The choice of logo was an Inuit Inukshuk, coloured in Olympic colours and personified with a face (the logo is on the Olympics website, linked above). I blogged about this here and here … but the jist of the debate was whether or not a non-native artist should be ‘appropriating’ a native symbol and if it was appropriate to take a symbol from the cultures of the Arctic to represent all of Canada or at the very least Canada’s west coast. Certainly there are a number of west coast aboriginal images that might have served as well, but the Canadian Olympic Committee decided that this northern icon represented the games, the city of Vancouver, the West Coast, and indeed all of Canada just fine.

Perhaps, Rex, you could steer me back to the original questions if I am not there …

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In this particular case, though, it might be difficult to claim privacy when the whole idea of protesting on the street is to present yourself in a public arena: here I am revealing myself to the world, here is me with my name and address so you can verify that I am a citizen with rights under your law, now please listen to my plea!

In another photo set Karen at her blog expresses indignation when she is told by a government official to stop taking photographs:

Taking a photograph of a public servant in the execution of their job is not a crime. He had no expectation of privacy. I was not preventing him from any of his job functions. Thus, he had no grounds to forbid me from taking photographs of him. As he yelled at me, I shrugged and turned away. He did not follow.

I wonder if the same logic might apply to the demonstrators. Shouldn’t the demonstrators not expect privacy either? While a demonstration is not a job, doesn’t it have to be public for it to be politically effective?

That being said, in the Japanese past the police and right-wing thugs have used photography as a means of suppressing dissidents…but that is another set of issues all together.

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Further, it would be difficult to craft a license that would satisfy Ms. Nakamura’s needs (“… you must agree to not post these photos/text in a derrogatory context…”). She needs to see the use with her own eyes in order to decide whether or not to issue a license in that context.

Of course, at least in the U.S., you’d still have all the exceptions to copyright law… such as the fair use defense. For example, since this post is arguably an educational, critical review of one aspect of her photoethnography essay and you wouldn’t be harming the market for such photographs by posting… you could even include a piece of one of the photos here in your post without authorization from Ms. Nakamura.

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On the other hand, as a contributor to Politec recently noted about the recent personal information leaks at major ID-aggregator sites, “it’s hard to be a privacy activist AND believe that information ‘wants to be free’ ” :)

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