Moral and Ethical Rights

Is your Oral History Legal and Ethical?

By Alan Ward
Oral History Society

This simple guide is for people who record oral history interviews, and organisations and individuals who keep collections of oral history recordings in the United Kingdom. The guide covers topics of ownership of seperate copyright, duration and scope of copyright, copyright and the internet and moral rights of performers. Ward also lays out practical steps to good practise for interviews and provides a FAQ section for quick reference.

The Shifting Ethics of Intellectual Property

Anthony Seeger
Smithsonian Institute
Yearbook for Traditional Music Vol. 28, 1996 pp 87-105

This article makes a number of practical suggestions for ethnomusicologist to consider, to ensure that the music of the peoples they work with is accorded similar treatment to that of commerical artists, aswell as ensuring that collected materials will survive into the next century.

Attachments:
The Shifting Ethics of Intellectual Property	584 Kb

Ethnomusicology and Music Law

Anthony Seeger
Smithsonian Institute
Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology Vol. 36, Fall 1992 pp 345-359

This article deals with issues of ownership, control and mastery in traditional socieites and how these customs interact with music law in the United States. Seegar explores the cultural presuppositions of copyright law, and the difficulties of translating the concept of copyright, into a model that works for traditional performers, archivists, recording companies and ethnomusicologists.

Attachments:
ethnomusicology and music law	411 Kb

The Ecology of Information Sharing in the Digital Age

by Kimberly Christen
Anthropology News, April 2009

Using her project in an Aboriginal community in Australia, Christen illustrates the diverse range of cultual and historical systems for sharing knowledge. She argues that the field of anthropology should be at the forefont of exploding the simplistic binaries of open and closed access, suggesting that anthropologist 'are intimately familiar with a wide range of historical and cultural systems for sharing knowledge, and yet we aren’t bringing this to bear on our understanding of open access debates or their ethical and practical implications.'

Attachments:
Access and Accountability.pdf	107 Kb

You Only Live Once: On Being a Troublemaking Professional

Ray Edmondson
IASA Journal, No 25, July 2005

Ray Edmondson, while tracing the history, reflects on some professional dilemmas, past and present, faced during his recently completed 33 year career at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA).

Ethical issues in Southern African archives and libraries

Peter Limb

The permanent removal of archives and collections robs Southern Africa of part of its cultural heritage and can demoralise local scholars. The author proposes principles and partnership strategies, including models of new digitisation projects, that can foster a more ethical approach and help maintain the content and context of collections.

The Safeguarding of the Audio Heritage: Ethics, Principles and Preservation Strategy

IASA Journal. December 2005. Version 3, IASA technical committee.

This article aims to identify problem areas and to propose recommended practices for use by sound and AV archives in today's technical environment. These recommendations are a balance between the ideal situation and the real world that we inhabit, covering the ethical consequences resulting from the technical aspects of recording, preserving and accessing sound documents within the framework of the technical development offered by today’s market situation.

Law & Ethics: Do You Copy?

By Barbara Hoffman

This article was published in Museum News January/February 2005. Published by the American Association of Museums, this article lays out the considerations and principles Museums should adopt while copying, adapting and distributing what they own.

Ethics in Our Time

By Ray Edmondson
IASA Journal No 27, July 2006 pp 6 – 9
With reference to various case studies which highlight the ethical dilemmas, Edmondson attempts to answer why people are so apparently accepting of incompetence and unethical behaviour by public authorities and corporations – many of whom advertise their own codes of ethics, accountability standards and trustworthiness on their websites.

What do I need to know about data protection, copyright and ethics?

This information Sheet on Data Protection, Ethics and Copyright by the East Midlands Oral History Archives outlines some of the main copyright issues and questions of ethics along with sources of further information and guidance.