8 ms·

Kaitiakitanga Māori Data Sovereignty Licences

67 points by edent 5y ago

anothernewdude 5y ago
Reminds me of time cube
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  ok I am now resolved to try and never look at HN comments again. Been really trying, but at this point I think the general chauvinism is pretty invariable. nothing to save here anymore
h2odragon 5y ago
> 6.1 Māori Data is ever only loan. Non Māori can not own Māori data. Tomorrow: "80% of the world's publishers discover Maori heritage, re-incorporate in NZ"
- Y_Y 5y ago
  > This comment is property of brown-eyes. Blue-eyes can never own this data. That's an absolutely bananas concept. It's fine to tie something like a person's personal identifying data to themselves, isn't it absurd to have some racial/tribal restriction on a piece of information?
  - mc32 5y ago
    It’s ridiculous but companies have made their bed by abusing the collection of people’s data and using that data unscrupulously and insecurely. So, you know, I have little sympathy here for the companies.
    - djrogers 5y ago
      Why are you bringing companies in to this? This is a straight up racial restriction which affects individuals.
      - mc32 5y ago
        Of course this is shortsighted and also impractical but it highlights the need for people to control their own data. Whether it’s this society referenced or another. It’s important that companies respect people’s data.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
        Because the most wide-scale abuse of people's data comes from corporations, not individuals.
        luckylion 5y ago
        A Maori corporation could "own" Maori data, as it would be Maori, owned by Maori. It's obviously a racial thing, not about companies.
  - AlanYx 5y ago
    I tend to agree with you, but there are a lot of academics currently pushing variations of the concept articulated in the linked article. The has been a decent amount of advocacy for IP rights for various forms "indigenous traditional knowledge" bubbling around academia and WIPO for years. Article 31 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) basically expanded the scope of that IP debate beyond "traditional knowledge" to new stuff created by indigenous peoples. New Zealand is currently pushing this area the hardest, but eventually most countries that ratify UNDRIP will end up with at least proposals in this area. The stomach in academia and some policy circles for pushing this stuff right now is pretty strong.
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    Under a western concept of ownership, yes. There are systems of ownership, particularly among tribal societies, where things are owned by a collective. The interface can get weird, but if you think of the tribe as a corporation that is its own legal entity distinct from the members it's not actually that foreign.
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      What I don't like about that concept is that it imposes restrictions on people in the tribe that I feel are unfair. If you want to share some of your Maori knowledge with a non-Maori how can you go about it? Do you need approval from 51% of all official members, or the board of directors or what? I think that cultural heritage belongs to humanity as a whole, and even if it didn't then there would be plenty of people who would just take what they "inherit" from their ancestors and share it with the rest of the world.
      - spoonjim 5y ago
        There is a corporate analog here in the form of a non-disclosure agreement. If you don't want to be part of the Maori community anymore, you can leave, like you can quit your job at Apple, but you're still not allowed to share Apple's knowledge with anyone else.
        Y_Y 5y ago
        But you don't opt-in to being Maori, nor can you opt-out. If you say that you could just stop hanging out with other Maori then fine, but does that disinherit you from the cultural heritage?
        spoonjim 5y ago
        I guess I’m just saying that your access to the cultural heritage can be contingent upon you following the rules (ie Don’t tell outsiders). If you break those rules, the community should be allowed to ostracize you within the bounds set by law (ie no burning your house down or anything).
  - ivanbakel 5y ago
    I think your example is discarding too much of the context. Rather than considering this through a racial lens, I think it would be more accurate to view it as an act of cultural stewardship - where the cultural separation, as in many parts of the world, largely follows racial and tribal lines. When thought of as a cultural act, it makes much more sense. Cultures implicitly lay claim to information i.e. their cultural heritage, all the time. It's also less surprising that you can find the concept itself "bananas", because the value system of your culture won't necessarily line up with that of other cultures and their stewards.
    - luckylion 5y ago
      > Cultures implicitly lay claim to information i.e. their cultural heritage, all the time. They do? How do you "own" cultural heritage? It sounds like the first step before accusing others of cultural robbery when they wear their hair a certain way or have a tattoo. I get the impression that anyone being in favor for that kind of thing hasn't thought it through. If your ethnic group can lay claim to some hairstyle, the dominant group automatically gets to claim all the stuff they introduced you to. It's a bad trade to get to decide who can wear dread locks, but have to give up all the benefits of modern society.
      - ivanbakel 5y ago
        >They do? How do you "own" cultural heritage? Well, the most obvious route is the legal one. Lots of cultures have legislation protecting the authenticity of certain kinds of products, like food - even if those products can be reproduced exactly elsewhere. You are not allowed to call your homemade cheese "parmigiano", no matter its quality or ingredients, because the recipe is "owned" by the cheesemakers of an area around Parma. There's even information ownership in fields which are ostensibly about physical things. Museums are full of objects whose historical value comes from the information they provide about the past - and in many places, that information is considered important enough for people to go to great lengths to make it available to the public. Countries often ban the export of historical artifacts, because it is felt that the public "own" the artifacts and the knowledge they can communicate.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    It is only bananas if you don't understand Maori culture. In Maori culture there is no such thing as absolute property right. Things are not ever really owned. They are more like owned collectively and borrowed based on need. Then western people came and gave them maori bosses couple trinkets which Maori thought is to borrow the property but westerners thought they are buying the property. It is a bit complicated. You can read up on it in Francis's Fukuyama "The origins of political order"
    - ratsforhorses 5y ago
      I remember one Maori telling me "it's your house, but it (all) our land..." which seems like a perfect antidote to the capitalistic cancer of printing free money, giving it to (unethical) corporations and letting them gobble up so much space that we're homeless...ofc it doesn't quite work that way either
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      I think information and land have salient differences. It's not fair to say that I must be wrong because I just don't "get it".
      - te_chris 5y ago
        But you clearly don’t get it, as your many posts in here show. Maori ideas of custodianship are wildly different: https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2544-understanding-kaitiakitanga https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2544-understanding...
- msla 5y ago
  How Māori is Māori? Where's the line drawn? Is it a one-drop rule or does there have to be some blood quantum? Otherwise, well, humans disperse and intermingle and at some point it's like asking who qualifies as a Visigoth, or an Etruscan.
  - thebooktocome 5y ago
    This is addressed in the license.
  - didntknowya 5y ago
    well i think it' something like you have to be 1/64th blood to claim their land/benefits so maybe that's a start
secondcoming 5y ago
What is this? Is this an official government policy? How is a publisher supposed to identify if someone is Maori?
- rgoulter 5y ago
  This part is where the author explains his views on current government policy: https://www.taiuru.maori.nz/maori-data-sovereignty-licences/#Social_Licences_are_incompatible_with_te_ao_Maori https://www.taiuru.maori.nz/maori-data-sovereignty-licences/...
- intellirogue 5y ago
  It's just a proposal by an academic. Probably intended to spark a conversation, as NZ is reviewing its privacy and data sovereignty law.
- lugged 5y ago
  I don't think it's official going by other commenters but as background, They're probably making the argument that their information is mana (spirit~) and therefore tapu (sacred/don't touch). I don't think many follow it but in traditional Maori culture you're not even allowed to let someone get ahold of your cut hair or nail clippings because they contain your mana and someone could curse you if they get ahold of it. https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world/page-5 https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world/page... Edit: More or less, yes > 2.1 Context. All data has a whakapapa (genealogy) and a mauri.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > They're probably making the argument that their information is mana (spirit~) and therefore tapu (sacred/don't touch). Usually spelled "taboo".
    - lugged 5y ago
      Tapu is a Maori word, it's a bit more nuanced / not quite the same as taboo but close. It's not like nobody can touch, just not everyone can touch. And not really about touch at all but it's part of it.
totetsu 5y ago
Oh god, this is entirely out of context for 99.999% of users of this site. I don't see any productive conversation coming from this.. All I can say.. is NZ is based on a partnership, between the crown and Maori peoples. (setting asside bi-vs-multi-cultural-ism for the moment) The idea that sovereignty was never given up by Maori is a very important one. There is a lot of thought on decolonialism recently. While whole world is subsumed by machinations extreme free-market techno-capitalist and data hording algorithm trainers, The Author of this article is apparently thinking about this form within a Maori world view. I can't really talk about it despite years of Highschool Tikanga and Reo classes, ect.. I dont think it makes much sense out of context..
- totetsu 5y ago
  on a side note I remember Richard stallman speaking at my University about intellectual property abolishment, and fielding a question about ownership rites of traditional Maori knowledge, which he completely didn't get.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
    Maybe he didn't get it.. or maybe you didn't like his answer?
    - totetsu 5y ago
      No it really seemed that he and the questioner didn't understand each other's points.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Animism is the new mindfulness?
- rory 5y ago
  What is the target here? A lot of the points seem to address personal data collection by companies or the government, but they define Māori data very broadly as: > data, information or knowledge in any format or medium, which is about, from, is produced by Māori Peoples Do they mean to include inventions? Code? Works of art?
kzrdude 5y ago
They should reconsider publishing on github, because their ideas clash pretty heavily with github's ideas of what they are entitled to.
echelon 5y ago
> This article introduces six new licence to protect Māori Data and recognise Māori Data Sovereignty rights today and for the next 1000 years. I'd be willing to bet everything I have and will ever own that there won't be humans as the predominant form of intelligence in 1,000 years. We'll either kill ourselves (or destroy civilization irreparably such that this doesn't matter), introduce AGI that outperforms and outlives us, or evolve our bodies into something better and longer lasting (brain uploads, etc.)
- xook 5y ago
  The other possibility, though remote, is we find ourselves at the mercy of some form of advanced extraterrestrial life. What ever should come after is anyone's guess, but it would mean we would be of lesser intelligence in the universe by comparison.
rambojazz 5y ago
Is this serious or is this some kind of joke?

67 points by edent 5y ago

anothernewdude 5y ago

Reminds me of time cube

beepbooptheory 5y ago
ok I am now resolved to try and never look at HN comments again. Been really trying, but at this point I think the general chauvinism is pretty invariable. nothing to save here anymore

h2odragon 5y ago

> 6.1 Māori Data is ever only loan. Non Māori can not own Māori data. Tomorrow: "80% of the world's publishers discover Maori heritage, re-incorporate in NZ"

Y_Y 5y ago
> This comment is property of brown-eyes. Blue-eyes can never own this data. That's an absolutely bananas concept. It's fine to tie something like a person's personal identifying data to themselves, isn't it absurd to have some racial/tribal restriction on a piece of information?
- mc32 5y ago
  It’s ridiculous but companies have made their bed by abusing the collection of people’s data and using that data unscrupulously and insecurely. So, you know, I have little sympathy here for the companies.
  - djrogers 5y ago
    Why are you bringing companies in to this? This is a straight up racial restriction which affects individuals.
    - mc32 5y ago
      Of course this is shortsighted and also impractical but it highlights the need for people to control their own data. Whether it’s this society referenced or another. It’s important that companies respect people’s data.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - hn_go_brrrrr 5y ago
      Because the most wide-scale abuse of people's data comes from corporations, not individuals.
      - luckylion 5y ago
        A Maori corporation could "own" Maori data, as it would be Maori, owned by Maori. It's obviously a racial thing, not about companies.
- AlanYx 5y ago
  I tend to agree with you, but there are a lot of academics currently pushing variations of the concept articulated in the linked article. The has been a decent amount of advocacy for IP rights for various forms "indigenous traditional knowledge" bubbling around academia and WIPO for years. Article 31 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) basically expanded the scope of that IP debate beyond "traditional knowledge" to new stuff created by indigenous peoples. New Zealand is currently pushing this area the hardest, but eventually most countries that ratify UNDRIP will end up with at least proposals in this area. The stomach in academia and some policy circles for pushing this stuff right now is pretty strong.
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  Under a western concept of ownership, yes. There are systems of ownership, particularly among tribal societies, where things are owned by a collective. The interface can get weird, but if you think of the tribe as a corporation that is its own legal entity distinct from the members it's not actually that foreign.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    What I don't like about that concept is that it imposes restrictions on people in the tribe that I feel are unfair. If you want to share some of your Maori knowledge with a non-Maori how can you go about it? Do you need approval from 51% of all official members, or the board of directors or what? I think that cultural heritage belongs to humanity as a whole, and even if it didn't then there would be plenty of people who would just take what they "inherit" from their ancestors and share it with the rest of the world.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      There is a corporate analog here in the form of a non-disclosure agreement. If you don't want to be part of the Maori community anymore, you can leave, like you can quit your job at Apple, but you're still not allowed to share Apple's knowledge with anyone else.
      - Y_Y 5y ago
        But you don't opt-in to being Maori, nor can you opt-out. If you say that you could just stop hanging out with other Maori then fine, but does that disinherit you from the cultural heritage?
        spoonjim 5y ago
        I guess I’m just saying that your access to the cultural heritage can be contingent upon you following the rules (ie Don’t tell outsiders). If you break those rules, the community should be allowed to ostracize you within the bounds set by law (ie no burning your house down or anything).
- ivanbakel 5y ago
  I think your example is discarding too much of the context. Rather than considering this through a racial lens, I think it would be more accurate to view it as an act of cultural stewardship - where the cultural separation, as in many parts of the world, largely follows racial and tribal lines. When thought of as a cultural act, it makes much more sense. Cultures implicitly lay claim to information i.e. their cultural heritage, all the time. It's also less surprising that you can find the concept itself "bananas", because the value system of your culture won't necessarily line up with that of other cultures and their stewards.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    > Cultures implicitly lay claim to information i.e. their cultural heritage, all the time. They do? How do you "own" cultural heritage? It sounds like the first step before accusing others of cultural robbery when they wear their hair a certain way or have a tattoo. I get the impression that anyone being in favor for that kind of thing hasn't thought it through. If your ethnic group can lay claim to some hairstyle, the dominant group automatically gets to claim all the stuff they introduced you to. It's a bad trade to get to decide who can wear dread locks, but have to give up all the benefits of modern society.
    - ivanbakel 5y ago
      >They do? How do you "own" cultural heritage? Well, the most obvious route is the legal one. Lots of cultures have legislation protecting the authenticity of certain kinds of products, like food - even if those products can be reproduced exactly elsewhere. You are not allowed to call your homemade cheese "parmigiano", no matter its quality or ingredients, because the recipe is "owned" by the cheesemakers of an area around Parma. There's even information ownership in fields which are ostensibly about physical things. Museums are full of objects whose historical value comes from the information they provide about the past - and in many places, that information is considered important enough for people to go to great lengths to make it available to the public. Countries often ban the export of historical artifacts, because it is felt that the public "own" the artifacts and the knowledge they can communicate.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  It is only bananas if you don't understand Maori culture. In Maori culture there is no such thing as absolute property right. Things are not ever really owned. They are more like owned collectively and borrowed based on need. Then western people came and gave them maori bosses couple trinkets which Maori thought is to borrow the property but westerners thought they are buying the property. It is a bit complicated. You can read up on it in Francis's Fukuyama "The origins of political order"
  - ratsforhorses 5y ago
    I remember one Maori telling me "it's your house, but it (all) our land..." which seems like a perfect antidote to the capitalistic cancer of printing free money, giving it to (unethical) corporations and letting them gobble up so much space that we're homeless...ofc it doesn't quite work that way either
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    I think information and land have salient differences. It's not fair to say that I must be wrong because I just don't "get it".
    - te_chris 5y ago
      But you clearly don’t get it, as your many posts in here show. Maori ideas of custodianship are wildly different: https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2544-understanding-kaitiakitanga https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2544-understanding...
msla 5y ago
How Māori is Māori? Where's the line drawn? Is it a one-drop rule or does there have to be some blood quantum? Otherwise, well, humans disperse and intermingle and at some point it's like asking who qualifies as a Visigoth, or an Etruscan.
- thebooktocome 5y ago
  This is addressed in the license.
- didntknowya 5y ago
  well i think it' something like you have to be 1/64th blood to claim their land/benefits so maybe that's a start

secondcoming 5y ago

What is this? Is this an official government policy? How is a publisher supposed to identify if someone is Maori?

rgoulter 5y ago
This part is where the author explains his views on current government policy: https://www.taiuru.maori.nz/maori-data-sovereignty-licences/#Social_Licences_are_incompatible_with_te_ao_Maori https://www.taiuru.maori.nz/maori-data-sovereignty-licences/...
intellirogue 5y ago
It's just a proposal by an academic. Probably intended to spark a conversation, as NZ is reviewing its privacy and data sovereignty law.
lugged 5y ago
I don't think it's official going by other commenters but as background, They're probably making the argument that their information is mana (spirit~) and therefore tapu (sacred/don't touch). I don't think many follow it but in traditional Maori culture you're not even allowed to let someone get ahold of your cut hair or nail clippings because they contain your mana and someone could curse you if they get ahold of it. https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world/page-5 https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world/page... Edit: More or less, yes > 2.1 Context. All data has a whakapapa (genealogy) and a mauri.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > They're probably making the argument that their information is mana (spirit~) and therefore tapu (sacred/don't touch). Usually spelled "taboo".
  - lugged 5y ago
    Tapu is a Maori word, it's a bit more nuanced / not quite the same as taboo but close. It's not like nobody can touch, just not everyone can touch. And not really about touch at all but it's part of it.

totetsu 5y ago

Oh god, this is entirely out of context for 99.999% of users of this site. I don't see any productive conversation coming from this.. All I can say.. is NZ is based on a partnership, between the crown and Maori peoples. (setting asside bi-vs-multi-cultural-ism for the moment) The idea that sovereignty was never given up by Maori is a very important one. There is a lot of thought on decolonialism recently. While whole world is subsumed by machinations extreme free-market techno-capitalist and data hording algorithm trainers, The Author of this article is apparently thinking about this form within a Maori world view. I can't really talk about it despite years of Highschool Tikanga and Reo classes, ect.. I dont think it makes much sense out of context..

totetsu 5y ago
on a side note I remember Richard stallman speaking at my University about intellectual property abolishment, and fielding a question about ownership rites of traditional Maori knowledge, which he completely didn't get.
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  Maybe he didn't get it.. or maybe you didn't like his answer?
  - totetsu 5y ago
    No it really seemed that he and the questioner didn't understand each other's points.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
Animism is the new mindfulness?
rory 5y ago
What is the target here? A lot of the points seem to address personal data collection by companies or the government, but they define Māori data very broadly as: > data, information or knowledge in any format or medium, which is about, from, is produced by Māori Peoples Do they mean to include inventions? Code? Works of art?

kzrdude 5y ago

They should reconsider publishing on github, because their ideas clash pretty heavily with github's ideas of what they are entitled to.

echelon 5y ago

> This article introduces six new licence to protect Māori Data and recognise Māori Data Sovereignty rights today and for the next 1000 years. I'd be willing to bet everything I have and will ever own that there won't be humans as the predominant form of intelligence in 1,000 years. We'll either kill ourselves (or destroy civilization irreparably such that this doesn't matter), introduce AGI that outperforms and outlives us, or evolve our bodies into something better and longer lasting (brain uploads, etc.)

xook 5y ago
The other possibility, though remote, is we find ourselves at the mercy of some form of advanced extraterrestrial life. What ever should come after is anyone's guess, but it would mean we would be of lesser intelligence in the universe by comparison.

rambojazz 5y ago

Is this serious or is this some kind of joke?