Image Ethics

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura, who writes the Photoethnography Blog, has posted a photo essay about a disability protest in Japan to her web site gallery. While I loved the essay, as a good pro-sharing netzen I naturally questioned her decision to use a restrictive license on her photos. Here is her license:

All of the photographs on this site are copyright 2005 Karen Nakamura and cannot be used without prior written permission.

In response, I wrote:

Karen, Why did you choose to use such a restrictive license for your work? There are many other options, which allow people to use your work without getting written permission as long as they give you proper aknowledgement, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and use the same license that you have chosen. Otherwise you are treating anyone who e-mails one of your pictures to a friend, or downloads one to their desktop, or posts a copy to their blog, as a criminal unless they go to the extraordinary step of contacting you first. Since you would presumably give permission for anything which fell within “fair use” you could easily provide a creative commons lincese which stated all this explicitly and has the full force of US copyright law behind it, but avoids the problems associated with restricting all use outright.

To which Karen then replied:

Good question. I want to protect my informants right to control how their image is used. The Creative Commons license protects against commercial re-use but not against non-commercial but still malicious re-use.

For example, there is nothing in the Creative Commons license that would prevent one of the photographs in my blog being used in another blog with a derogatory caption; or re-used in other non-commercial ways that would upset the people who I work with.

I prefer to err on the side of requiring re-use consent be given so that I can control how the images are used. If this blog were just photos of Minnesota mosquitoes (our state bird), it would be licensed differently.

This is something I have not seen Free Culture types discuss. It isn’t an attempt to limit copyright for commercial profit, but in order to protect her informants images from being misused. While I wonder if it is truly possible to limit such “malicious re-use” in the sense that Karen discusses, I understand her motivations in seeking to do so. I would very much like to see more discussion about how anthropologists might put work into the public domain, or Creative Commons, without reneging on our responsibility to protect our informants and ethnographic collaborators.

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8 thoughts on “Image Ethics”

  1. This is exactly the point at which issues of copyright reform and the ‘who owns native culture’ debate meet. I think if you have a sufficiently nuanced theory of cultural creativity etc. then it is possible to work through this thicket, but if all you’re going on is anthropology’s broad populism and a laundry list of politically correct things you believe in (I’m not accusing Kerim of this, just saying in general) then it seems insurmountable. I’d be interested in hearing Tad’s response, given how proactive First Nationers in Canada are about this. My feeling is this is one of those areas where a little more theory really will have analytic pay off.

    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’ ” 🙂

  2. Copyright and much of IP is all about control. And Ms. Nakamura knows her rights.

    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.

  3. That’s a real dilemma! On the one hand I’d say not publish at all if you’re worried about the privacy of your field contacts. On the other hand I fully understand the desire to tell the world about the plight of the disabled in Japan.

    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.

  4. Karen’s response to Kerim’s original question and the follow-up comments raise a number of inter-related issues in my mind. My first reaction is the same as Tak’s … respect your agreements with informants (even if the setting is a public one) and if the ‘need to know’ about a particular incident seems paramount, revisiting your informants might be the only way to go.

    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 …

  5. Oh I was just struck by Kerim’s reaction to Karen’s choice. 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_?”

    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.

  6. 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.

  7. If you intend to keep photographs and videodata under control, don`t put them on the internet. Using a restrictive licence is a demonstration of good will, but no guarantee.
    Especially in regards of public demonstrations (for it was mentioned above) the question of publishing images or not is even more difficult when the demonstrators get criminalized by police.
    In 2002/2003 I was doing participant observation in Hamburg on a series of demonstrations and civil protests against local town politics (Bambule). I had filmed almost every demonstration, collected a big number of phonenumbers and names from participating people willing to meet for interview and had introduced myself to ´the scene` multiply, which meant spreading aim, name and phonenumber.
    I intended to make a documentary on it and connect it with a reflection on institutionalized conflicts, but I soon got aware of the damoclesness of the material I had collected, when more and more people got caught and accused of whatdoIknow disobedience. (Their legal cases–a long series of legal cases–had recently been brought to court winter2004/spring2005.) Then someday in early 2003 I was called by a lawyer from Hamburg who wanted copies of my videotapes. I denied giving the tapes nor any copy off hands and instead offered him to come to Hamburg and have him have a look at the material within my presence. For he had made the matter very urgent, I wondered a little bit, why he did not make any use of my offer.
    Local infotainment media was very keen on videos, too.
    I did show the tapes only to some friends off my private sphere and decided to wait until the material was less “hot”. I maybe one day will make use of it and finish the item. I just could not cope with the responsability I had for the informations possibly being instrumentalized when giving them off hand in that case.

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