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
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