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Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

> 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"

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

They don't own the information/recipe, they own a trade mark. That's very different. You can absolutely make parmigiano, you just can't call it that.

For artifacts etc: it's about the physical items. I'm not aware of a nation outlawing e.g. discussion or reproduction of that artifact anywhere else in the world.

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.

Why are you bringing companies in to this? This is a straight up racial restriction which affects individuals.

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.

Because the most wide-scale abuse of people's data comes from corporations, not individuals.

A Maori corporation could "own" Maori data, as it would be Maori, owned by Maori.

It's obviously a racial thing, not about companies.

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.

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.

I'm not familiar with the Maori in particular, but most traditional cultures prior to the Gutenberg revolution had special knowledge that they tried to keep to themselves. Typically there were a class of people who were responsible for both ensuring that the knowledge didn't get lost or become available to the wrong people. Typically learning this knowledge required first committing to guarding its secrecy, so I wouldn't agree it's an unfair restriction on the people who have it. It might not be useful for the culture in the long term, but then again it might. These cultures have seen some ages pass.

If the argument is just that everyone benefits when licenses are more free I wouldn't disagree, but having the option to impose different licenses doesn't seem like a bad thing. And whatever the details, that's what this boils down to, a particular set of restrictions on the use of a particular set of data.

Not only unfair, they're downright restrictive to growth. There's a reason that no civilization with such concepts of tribal ownership has developed into anything worthwhile, they're basically living the tragedy of the commons at its maximal level.

>There's a reason that no civilization with such concepts of tribal ownership has developed into anything worthwhile

Which civilizations are "worthwhile" and which are not?

Hard to say, but I'd argue getting past the iron age on their own is a good start for a metric.

Ascribing one person's position (the person suggesting sovereignity licenses) to be an examplar of how entire cultures haven't "developed into anything worthwhile" is racist.

Relevant XKCD comic, of course: https://xkcd.com/385/

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.

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?

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).

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"

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".

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...

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

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.

well i think it' something like you have to be 1/64th blood to claim their land/benefits so maybe that's a start

This is addressed in the license.

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