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
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.
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?
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.
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)