The Lakota Language Consortium had promised to preserve the tribe’s native language and had spent years gathering recordings of elders, including Taken Alive’s grandmother, to create a new, standardized Lakota dictionary and textbooks.
But when Taken Alive, 35, asked for copies, he was shocked to learn that the consortium, run by a white man, had copyrighted the language materials, which were based on generations of Lakota tradition. The traditional knowledge gathered from the tribe was now being sold back to it in the form of textbooks.
“No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us. Our stories belong to us. Our songs belong to us,” Taken Alive, who teaches Lakota to elementary school students, told the tribal council in April.
The legal fundraising page for the man in the article is here
Seeing this shit happen in 2024 blows my fucking mind
Not to be pedantic, but this happened in 2022, OP posted an old article. Not sure where they are at now.
Why the fuck isn’t this bigger news? His goal should already be funded in the millions and the fucks who stole their language should be sitting in prison.
Because it’s a lot less straight forward than that and this guy is a crank with a history of intimidation against other Lakota people.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197956092
https://lastrealindians.com/news/2023/10/25/rl1qqmxm3cpcvoe8k9vsiv06gxibns
Also this legal fund is for a hearing that happened a year ago so don’t donate to it.
Not being a perfect person does not mean they’re wrong though.
If you make a textbook covering Newtonian physics, the textbook is copyrightable even though the work of Isaac Newton is public domain.
Similarly, while the Lakota language is public domain, textbooks and lessons designed to teach it are owned by whoever creates those textbooks and lessons.
There is nothing preventing someone else creating textbooks to teach to Lakota language as the language public domain. If it’s effortless to create such a textbook, then it shouldn’t be a problem. If it’s very difficult to create such a textbook, then the people that made that effort should be compensated. It’s hypocritical to say the creation of textbooks didn’t involve any effort while also being unwilling to match that effort to create the textbook yourself.
Copyrights can be bought of course. Raising money to simply buy the copyrights to these textbooks might be a better use of donation money than an attempt to use white guilt on the legal system. I’m not a lawyer, so who knows, maybe they can claim they own the copyright on the language itself, a language that existed before Steamboat Willie. But it feels like a waste of time to me.
A clean room re-write of the books probably wouldn’t cost too much if the company that owns the copyrights to these textbooks don’t want to sell the rights for a reasonable price.
A clean room re-write of the books probably wouldn’t cost too much if the company that owns the copyrights to these textbooks don’t want to sell the rights for a reasonable price.
That’s a long way to say that you’re completely maliciously ignorant on endangered languages & language preservation, fascist bootlicker. Move to some other site to spread your corporatist-compliant “enlightened centrist” propoganda, it’s disgusting to see your comments littered everywhere like trash on a beach. Or at the very least, don’t shill on the behalf of greedy fucks who are abusing a group’s vulnerability and the law to exploit a nearly-dead culture for money. It’s a language with like 2000 fluent speakers, mostly old people who will be dust not long from now. You are, quite plainly, deflecting responsibility for them taking the work of a vulnerable group and claiming ownership of it to make money, against the knowledge and wishes of the group whose labor they practically stole.
And now you’re making a show of gaslighting the victims and the people who are rightfully against the exploitation, by comparing the work of the victims to basic facts of the universe that are observed in nature, while also using it as an attempt to defend your favorite shitty economic system/ideology. Like seriously, do you think languages are just something that exist in the wild outside of the confines of living beings? Do you think these people just observed some feral Lakota words and grammar the same way that Newton observed the laws of the universe? No, they obtained everything almost exclusively via the work of the speakers of the damn language, and despite being a “nonprofit” used it to make profit while depriving the native speakers of the records of their own language and oral history.
I am a linguist, and I can say with confidence that a strong majority of linguistics researchers and language preservationists find this, and practices like this, despicable – linguistics is a field where the overwhelming attitude is that knowledge needs to be open, especially in the context of an endangered or dying language/culture. You don’t just exploit a population for profit and refuse to leave, and still talk about how you’re doing a good thing. What these people do – and continue to do – is a disgrace.
while also being unwilling to match that effort to create the textbook yourself.
But the textbook was developed jointly, precisely through the cooperative labor between the two groups, no? It would not have been possible without the native speakers willing to share this information in the first place, no?
Can we just meditate on this portion of the headline for a second?
Lakota elders helped a white man preserve their language
Is that really what happened here? He was preserving their language, and they helped him do it?
Seems to me like this headline could just as legitimately read:
White man helps Lakota elders preserve their language, but they refuse to pay him for his help
I am SO glad I blocked you. To never have to read a shit take like that again will be reason enough.
They got multiple upvotes. Very unfortunate
intensely human is intensely an asshole.
From the fundraising page:
I recently received a Cease and Desist letter on behalf of the LLC and Alex Fire Thunder, their deputy director signed by Chase Iron Eyes, a member of their legal team. They are also being represented by the lawfirm, Bochetto and Lentz, from Pennsylvania. Bochetto and Lentz helped represent Donald Trump in one of his impeachment hearings. They also fought to preserve “Columbus Day,” in Pennsylvania as well as a Columbus statue. They are targeting my social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok in an attempt to silence me. Although I am a Tribal citizen living in my traditional homelands, they are threatening to sue me through the Indiana state court system and/or South Dakota State court. Here are some examples of Social Media Activism
The LLC is targeting me with an attempt to strip me of my professional licensure. A copy of the complaint is here:
My hearing to defend my licensure is June 27th, at 9 am central time in Pierre, South Dakota.
They also targeted my wife with the South Dakota State Department of Education. Her hearing was held June 21st in Pierre, SD. She will know the outcome of that hearing on Thursday, June 29thNote that the hearings they write about already happened last year.
TBH I think the headline does a shit job of describing what the company did wrong. They didn’t just try to make the tribes pay for books, they put their copywrite on somebody else’s language and stories. That’s not alright.
Why is a non-profit trying to make profit out of this operation, rather than freely distributing the knowledge they’ve collected? The US are so permissive with their NGOs that it’s far easier to find a nest of grifters than a legitimate one.
Non profit doesn’t mean free. A non profit costs money to run. In this case I guess arguably selling textbooks and material is how the money to preserve the language comes in. The only alternativesnwould presumably be charitable donations.
Money that comes in to a non profit is not used for profit or shares but reinvested in the non profit to further its goal such as preserving a dying language.
I’ve seen the money management in US NGOs earn. If they want to claim they have tight budgets, they have to tighten their belts first.
To make money from a non profit you need to create exorbitant costs.
I hope some lawyers step up to fight this.
Interesting. I doubt the source material is copyrightable, but I also doubt the consortium is under any legal obligation to provide copies, unless signed some previous agreement to that effect.
The language itself isn’t copyrightable.
But when a song is recorded there is a mechanical copyright to the recording. That should have been shared by the performers and the producer.
The language belongs to them, not the textbooks. Why would you have the rights to a book you didn’t write, that is about something you own? What were they expecting?
Yeah I expected the contrarian contingent of lemmy to come defend the wrong thing. Not just because lemmy be lemmy but also because tumblr told me so. To wit:
Those two men who’s race is irrelevant by the way, do all of the actual work of making a textbook. I think its ok that they expect that work to be treated as their own.
This is only a big deal because it reminds people of actual injustices natives suffered at the hands of white people
Maybe they should just write their own textbook.
Were the confederate generals’ race irrelevant? They’d have to be, wouldn’t they.
Irrelevant to what? Their race is relevant to some things and not others. The race of those two men is not relevant to this specific situation. If they did something wrong, it wouldn’t suddenly be right if they were a different race, and vice versa.
You seem extraordinarily sure that their race is irrelevant. Did the fact that their names are Wilhelm and Jan raise a dry smile then? No. Well, maybe it’s just me.
Yeah its just you. I like to judge people based on their actions instead of their race and name.
Agree, it’s like math you don’t own math or how to do math but math books are copyrighted. The guy did some serious work in speaking to the elders and documenting the language. Grated the tribe should have gotten some free copies for their participation. Nobody is stopping the tribe from taking those books and rewriting them using the translations from the book and then teaching the language to their descendants. They own the language.
Granted the tribe should have gotten some free copies for their participation.
They did. The LLC distributed over a million dollar’s worth of material for free and also the elders that worked with the LLC were directly paid for their time.
So why is this man suing then?
There’s no lawsuit. LLC believed he was using his position at a school district as part of a defamation campaign against them so they issued a complaint and he had to defend his teaching license. This happened a year ago and he never turned off the fundraiser.
Do you have a link with that info?
I was going on a lot of different things but NPR did a good piece on it https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197956092
Also here’s a telling of Ray Taken Alive making a scene at a conference presentation and trying to intimidate a Lakota woman and interrupt her presentation which I can only assume was the breaking point for LLC since it happened 2 months before they sent their cease and desist. https://lastrealindians.com/news/2023/10/25/rl1qqmxm3cpcvoe8k9vsiv06gxibns
You should leave your assumptions out of this
I appreciate you taking the time to fund those links.
Thank you.
In the article, it says they do give free copies for educational purposes. It doesn’t say whether that happened in practice or not.
So “he said” then.
It sounds a bit scummy, but it seems that’s what they agreed to. They’d get paid to provide the knowledge, and he would make and sell the books, etc. And it sounds like the materials are provided for free for schools and other educational purposes.
Sure, hate capitalism all you want, but it’s the system we live in, and it’s what enables the guy to be a linguist instead of having to hunt and farm and house himself. If the tribes want their knowledge kept within the tribe, they will have to do the work themselves.
iTs ThEiR fAuLt tHeY gOt ScAmMeD
Sure, hate capitalism all you want, but it’s the system we live in, and it’s what enables the guy to be a linguist instead of having to hunt and farm and house himself.
This tribe has barely 16,000 people registered as tribal members, total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_Rock_Indian_Reservation
Do you really think the number of books they’re asking for is truly obscene? With barely 16,000 people, it’s not like they have a metric fuckton of kids who are going to need access to these books to learn about their own history.
Is that really going to impact his ability to take care of himself?
This is like those jokers who act like Naomi Klein literally naming her book and making the thesis “This Changes Everything” and that we have to get rid of capitalism and reject it wholesale to prevent total collapse wasn’t out of line for at the very least also releasing a free, digital copy of the book, if it really “changes everything.” Just like these people, they’re never willing to put their money where their fucking mouth is. She wouldn’t have lost print sales because a digital copy existed.
Same here, he could just give them DRM’d digital copies of his book and fuck off already instead of acting like this is going to be a massive impact on his ability to sell the book. What do they want a hundred books? Oh no! Fuck me, what a joke.
Finally, it’s not a single guy, it’s a “non-profit consortium” and if you look into them, Executive Pay makes up 13% of their total budget. Maybe they could just not pay the fucking CEO so much and then maybe they could actually pay their fucking linguist and give away books to Standing Rock kids.
Their revenue is $898K and their operating budget is $931K which to me sounds like a lot of fucking white people who don’t know how to budget for shit.
If the goal was really to sell educational materials, then yes, those 16,000 people are the vast majority of people who would ever buy intensive Lakota language instruction, and that’s why he’s refusing to sell.
There are a small number of linguists specializing in Native American languages, and probably an even smaller number of non-Lakota amateurs. For the rest of people, a YouTube video will satisfy their curiosity and they would never pay for a full course.
But it would be a dick move for them to spend all that time with a community for the purpose of preserving an endangered language, and then make it harder to preserve the language.
If the goal was really to sell educational materials, then yes, those 16,000 people are the vast majority of people who would ever buy intensive Lakota language instruction, and that’s why he’s refusing to sell.
Wow, out and out that it’s 100% okay to sell a marginalized society’s history back to them at a price. What. The. Fuck.
Do you know why there aren’t tons of Native American linguists out there? Because Native Americans are by and large poor marginalized communities. Plus, as a community of only barely 16,000 people, it’s not exactly like they have a massive pool of talent to pull from when it comes to linguists. Most kids probably aren’t growing up hoping to be linguists. Plus, once again, most are god damned dirt poor.
(As an aside, they’re literally trying to take this guys teaching license. Their solution is to say “Fuck them Native American kids, they don’t need teachers!” Yeah, they really “care” about this community.)
But because their own community didn’t have a homegrown linguist it’s okay to sell their history back to them because they’re… the only people who care about that history?? Tacitly admitting that no one else gives a shit, so the Consortium “have to” exploit the only people who care, the very people they learned it all from themselves. The people who were too poor for their own home-grown linguist.
Fuck it, we’re done here, this is some seriously dumb totally exploitative white people shit.
Take this white savior shit and shove it up your fucking ass, civility rules can get fucked because saying that kind of shit isn’t even close to civil. Colonizers are always polite when they’re pointing their gun in your face. Or in this case, their legal systems.
Like we’re literally talking about less than 16,000 people living on a RESERVATION “given to them” by the nation that stole all their fucking land and killed half their tribes people. A nation that has 350 million plus people. They’re the definition of marginalized and exploited.
Bruh, did you even finish reading my comment? I know it’s fucked up. But you were wondering why it’d be such a big deal to provide them with free materials when there are only 16,000 of them. And the answer is because they were always planning on selling it right back to them.
Wow, out and out that it’s 100% okay to sell a marginalized society’s history back to them at a price. What. The. Fuck.
The American way.
Sure, hate capitalism all you want, but it’s the system we live in
As pointed out in the first paragraph of the article, “Lakota Language Consortium” is a nonprofit organization. While NPOs operate in our capitalist system, you expect them to have goals besides pure profit.
It’s not actually a legitimate excuse for regular corporations, either!
The notion that corporations have an obligation to maximize shareholder profit, let alone to the sociopathic exclusion of everything else, is nothing less than a complete perversion of what the privilege of incorporation is supposed to be for.
Oh dude the list of things we’ve let corporations get away with over the centuries… They were originally supposed to be limited time, often purely for a single project, and kept under a watchful eye. Because we knew they were dangerous.
They’ve gone from that to permanent titans of industry with the rights of a person, held above any rights of individuals they come into contact with.
“Just because money is involved in it does not inherently make it an evil thing,” Meya said in a recent interview with NBC News. Most of the products his organizations make are free, he said, but the cost of printing textbooks has to come from somewhere.
I mean, this kinda makes sense. Just because the org got $3.5M in funding for 15 years of operations doesn’t mean the process of producing those textbooks is free. I’m guessing the grant money was spent on 15 years of work making recordings, and is now gone.
No. Just, no. I mean what the hell, man?!?
That does not make any sense at all. I get someone to invest a bunch of money to research your language and culture, convince you not to worry cause I’m gonna take care of it, only to sell the work I “volunteered” to do back to you, that’s nothing other than the most vile, deceptive, and manipulative way to extract “value” from the world around me. This utterly sociopathic and depraved behavior is exactly what is being talked about when people insist that “job creators” deserve praise for their efforts.
Unless I missed it, they didn’t have any agreement that he’d provide them with books for free. Having to finally shell out $50 for a textbook of your langauge that was dying isn’t asking that much.
It would be sociopathic if he had lied to them, but there’s no indication that he did. Maybe I missed something in the story where he reneged on a promise?
The entire premise is disgusting, and clearly, there was no warning that there’s gonna be a price tag. Fuck the capitalist class, the jackass trying to fleece them is not the victim. I literally couldn’t care less there was no “guarantee it’d be free”. Fuck outta here with that.
Edit: And the $50 argument stinks, too. It’s the copyright issue. You will never convince me there is any excuse for declaring somebody’s language my intellectual property is a justifiable thing on any level.
You will never convince me there is any excuse for declaring somebody’s language my intellectual property is a justifiable thing on any level.
Nobody did that. Do you think Merriam Webster is copyrighting the English language by publishing a dictionary? Do you think they don’t hold the copyright to their dictionary?
Copyright is the most common form of intellectual property. They are literally using intellectual property law against the native speakers of the language.
But, whatever. Jerkwad making money off the situation is in the wrong. The entire concept of “rent seeking” by profiteering off the economy is a cancer on our society. And that’s why this guy went into business, to extract value from the situation, aka “rent seeking”. His cumulative effect on the whole situation is gonna be negative for everyone around him; where do you think “profit” comes from?
But I’ll agree to disagree. You are not gonna convince me, nor I you. More power to you (no, not sarcastically)
What they actually own the copyright to is the fake entries they added to the dictionary because mere collections of facts aren’t copyrightable.
Not really no. A lot of work goes into observing how words are used and writing definitions that describe those uses. Someone has to actually write the definitions and their writings are copyrightable.
They don’t own the rights to describing a word, they do own how they described a word.
Missing the point. Making up excuses. What, they need a spindle of CD ROMs to give them a copy of the raw data back? Here’s twenty bucks, problem solved. Oh that’s not enough? Right. Never is.
Oh are the recordings the matter of the dispute? He’s refusing to give them copies of the recordings?
I may have missed something. I thought they were challenging his right to charge money for the textbooks.
He got the recordings, he also wanted control of the copyright for those recordings. This would have prevented LLC from even continuing to publish their Lakota dictionary and other language materials. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197956092
That is so white man
That is so racist.
Sad part is this is a general human trait, but the commenter and their supporters fail to understand that by attributing it to a specific race, they unwittingly become the racists they so claim to despise.
No it’s not you honkey fuck
White man shoulda thought about that before creating race.
Speaking as a white man, I don’t see why you needed to repeat what they said back to them.
That is also so white man
WATCH OUT EVERYONE! A WHITE PERSON FEELS PERSECUTED BECAUSE THEY’RE WHITE!!! IN ‘MURICA!!!
❄️
PS: I’m white. Get over yourself, lol
Me pointing out that racist statements are racist means I’m not over myself? How’s that work?
If you had the faintest clue how white leipel stole the West those words never would have formed in your brain.
Yeah but see I didn’t. And I’m white. So it’s not so much a “white man” thing is it?
This is from 2022, it is not news. Are there any more recent articles on this? How’d it go?
“No matter how it was collected, where it was collected, when it was collected, our language belongs to us. Our stories belong to us. Our songs belong to us,” Taken Alive,
Ok sure you can say that but when somebody receives payment in exchange for being recorded reciting a story signs over the rights to the recording you, the grandchild of the person who actually did the performance for the recording, do not own the rights to that recording.
If you actually read the SDDE complaint it’s pretty damning. This guy sucks, don’t give him money.
I disagree. Smarmy IP lawyer standard bullshit. “We legally obtained the rights to shit on your car”
Hey, you love Disney and copyright law, that’s great but this is a misuse of it and going after this guy’s livelihood - as an elementary school teacher ffs - is low. It’s wrong. They’re doing bad things and just because you love the establishment doesn’t mean you should support that.
“My grandmother was paid to recite material, it’s literally theft of my heritage that I, her grandchild, do not own the distribution rights to that specific recording”
If they were trying to copyright the stories or the language that would be one thing but it’s just their recordings and material they’ve produced. He probably shouldn’t have used his position at the school as part of his slander campaign if he didn’t want to risk losing it. If there was no professional misconduct then his licensure isn’t at much risk.
Oh for fucks sake. You’re ridiculous.
The guy who mocked a C&D asking him to stop provably lying about a nonprofit and then begging for money online is ridiculous.
