Why does the digitization of oral knowledge transfer the ownership through digital copyright?   

Within our relationships, and within our Indigenous lived experience, we interact with vulnerable Indigenous Gulf Coast communities who are impacted by coastal climate change. The intensity and visibility of this change has created an influx of research projects, artists, journalists, and climate solvers engaged in research and storytelling around lived experiences within South Louisiana. These projects often extract time, effort, knowledge, emotions, and stories. This extraction of labor is considered an exchange or investment in research, reports, news, or other endeavors with the potential for impact. Often, this potential for impact fails to materialize into significant quality of life changes in return for inter-generational lived knowledge. 

BPA believes we can re-imagine how storytelling and information gathering can be made to be immediately equitable. We see this specific, localized issue within the Gulf South Indigenous communities as a patterned issue of data extraction across minoritized global communities who engage in inequitable intellectual knowledge transfer within research, journalism, and media production activities. 

in 2022, Bvlbancha Public Access along with Ripple Effect and Houma Language Project prototyped an interaction design and legal process which addresses Indigenous data sovereignty. Uke’ Contracting System considers how anyone creating oral history or traditional knowledge interviews as part of research or production inquiry ensures the rights of their recordings belong to the knowledge owner. 

How it works

The Uke' Contracting system gives sole ownership of digital content to the knowledge holder at the initial fixation of copyright for sound, video, and image recordings. 

This two-part contracting system ensures knowledge holders maintain full copyright of their media’s futures and profits, while providing their collaborators with limited, project-specific licenses. It does this using the following two documents: 

1. WORK FOR HIRE AGREEMENT - This contract confirms that the Knowledge Holder maintains full copyright to the media. If this was land, this would be the deed.

2. COPYRIGHT LICENSE AGREEMENT - This contract gives limited use to the Interviewer to use the media within a specific project scope. If this was land, this would be the rent agreement. 

Download

This is an open-access project. Please feel free to download, use, and modify this process to fit your needs. The templates are licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. If you make any great updates that you think are helpful, pass them along to us via email so we can update for everyone else who may be experimenting with the system.