Teresa Scassa - Blog

The recent story of the wholesale copying of an Inuit shaman’s robe by a UK designer raises interesting issues regarding the legal protection (or lack thereof) for indigenous cultural heritage in Canada as well as the cultural dissonance that can arise in disputes over the right to use certain motifs, designs and images.

In this case, the great-granddaughter of an Inuit shaman has expressed dismay over the use of the design of a shaman’s jacket. The design for the original jacket was one that came to her great-grandfather in a dream. The jacket had been photographed and the photograph appeared in a book titled Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English by Penny Petrone, published in 1988. According to the CBC story, a replica of the same shaman’s jacket was used in a 2006 film titled The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.

Seen through a Western IP lens, the shaman who created the design might well be its author, and the design might be capable of copyright protection, but the term of copyright protection would have expired by now. As a result, the design is in the “public domain” and anyone is free to copy it. Yet from the great-granddaughter’s perspective, the design is sacred, and its reproduction or use should be subject to consent. Who is entitled to give this consent and under what terms may be complex questions, yet they are questions that ethics, at least, if not law, require to be asked.

The issue of the appropriation of indigenous imagery or designs in fashion and in other contexts is a recurring one. In Canada, for example, a dispute arose over the decision of HBC to outsource the creation of imitation Cowichan sweaters for sale during the Vancouver Olympics. Other fashion designers have been taken to task for their appropriation of indigenous cultural imagery and design. There have also been concerns raised about the appropriation of indigenous tattoo designs, as well as the incorporation of other indigenous designs or symbols into fashion and home décor items. There have been many instances as well of the use of indigenous pictographs on t-shirts. In March 2015, the CBC also reported on the use of First Nations design elements in the fashion line of Dsquared2, although in this case the concerns were not simply over cultural appropriation but also over the use of offensive terminology. These are only a very few examples.

Arguments about the right to restrict and control the use of sacred imagery, or the right to control the production and reproduction of indigenous designs are frequently treated as normative ones. In other words, they turn on what “should” be done, rather than what “must” be done. Laws, including intellectual property laws, provide legal tools to exercise control over works, but the reality is that these laws are focussed on identifying and defining property rights in creative output and in facilitating the economic exploitation of this output. While intellectual property laws can also be used to restrict the commercial exploitation of works, their focus on individual authors and the limited term of protection are not well-adapted to protecting material that is sacred to a people. The concept of the “public domain” – those things which are not protected or no longer protected by IP laws and are therefore free to all to use – can be particularly problematic when it comes to the disconnect between IP laws and indigenous cultural property. While many First Nations in Canada have found ways to use existing intellectual property laws to give them some ability to prevent or control the commercial exploitation of traditional images or designs (certification marks and official marks, for example, have been used in some cases), the effectiveness of these tools will vary according to the circumstances, and in some cases they may simply not be suitable.

Normative arguments are easy to dismiss and ignore, in part because the legal machinery of the state is not there to recognize and enforce them. As Canada enters a new era of reconciliation, law and policy makers should turn their attention to addressing the gaps between what it is right to protect and what the law will actually protect.

A new paper by uOttawa Common Law student Niki Singh and myself, and published in the Journal of e-Democracy, explores the issue of how to unroll open data programs in officially bi- or multi-lingual jurisdictions. Our focus is on Canada, although similar issues may arise in other jurisdictions with more than one official language.

The issue of linguistic equality in open data initiatives is particularly important if one takes into account the civic engagement dimensions of open government as well as the potential for use of open data by civil society organizations to meet their diverse goals. To date, at least at the federal level in Canada, there has been a strong emphasis on using open data to stimulate innovation. Much less emphasis has been placed, at least at the policy level, on using open government data to promote transparency or to support the work of civil society groups. The capacity of many civil society groups in Canada to work effectively with open data is even open to question. The necessary skills and expertise to work with open data may not yet be available to all such groups. In this context, then, compliance with the letter and spirt of official language policies requires a focus not just on bilingual data and bilingual tools to access the data (although these are certainly important), it also requires support for digital and data literacy that effectively reaches the different linguistic communities.

A few years ago, Jo Bates wrote an interesting article that explored whether and to what extent open government data initiatives within a neo-liberal frame may seek to offload responsibility for the delivery of some information-based government services to the private sector. In other words, rather than have the government develop and deliver information-based services to the public, the government might make its data available as open data and let the private sector develop useful apps involving that data. Evidence of this neo-liberal approach to information policy is present in Canada. For example, the decision of the last federal government in Canada to abolish the long form census was in part justified on the (controversial) view that equivalent data could be sourced from the private sector. If open data regimes operate within this neo-liberal frame, it is important also to consider the fate of minority language communities (among others) as data-related analysis and services are offloaded to the private sector.

Using the efforts and obligations of the Canadian federal government as a case study, our paper identifies some of the challenges posed by developing and implementing an open data agenda within an officially bilingual state. We consider two main issues. The first is whether open data initiatives might be used as a means to outsource some information analysis and information services to an unregulated private sector, thus directly or indirectly avoiding obligations to provide these services in both official languages. The second is whether the Canadian government’s embrace of the innovation agenda of open data leaves minority language communities underserved and under-included in the development and use of open data. Although ultimately the evidence at this early stage is inconclusive, the questions are important ones to be asking, particularly as a new federal government takes charge of the open data agenda in Canada.