Aboriginal Archive Uses New DRM

ianare writes "An application that gives fresh new meaning to 'digital rights management' has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians. It relies on a user's profile to control access to a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user's name, age, sex and standing within their community comes from traditions over what can and cannot be viewed. For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families. These requirements threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also about how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people, and where they were situated."

Re:How is this DRM?

[Penguinisto]

This doesn't sound like DRM. It sounds like access control.

Depends on how they assembled it. If it's some sort of self-contained website-on-a-box, then yeah, it's probably a local DB (MySQL?) and local PHP with perms based on the profile info.

OTOH, if they rigged it as one big fat binary, then the access controls locked into the binary is similar in concept (though nowhere near as complete as true DRM which looks for a key, IMHO).

/P

Re:Easily hacked?

[KublaiKhan]

Just a case of necessitating identification information upon registering the account. Could do it with a trusted-registrar scheme, where the village elders vouch for the details of those under their jurisdiction.

Given your comment, I'm wondering...

[tlambert]

Given your comment, I'm wondering...

Can't they respect their own traditions without imposing technologically enforced access controls? What do they do when someone uses hard-copy information, or, to take an example from the article, a man viewing woman's rituals?

What is the point of building an access control system like this?

-- Terry

Not an uncommon issue for archivists

[Selanit]

Archivists typically have to respect the rules of the communities they serve regarding access to materials. Sometimes that means, say, putting a bunch of somebody's steamy love letters under lock and key until all of the named parties have died off. Other times it means managing intellectual property rights. And sometimes you run into cases like this one, where the cultural rules regarding the material are more involved.

I still think my favorite example was a living history project - the researchers involved had been recording traditional stories. One of them was an explanatory myth about why it snows. The problem was that there was a strong tradition requiring that the story be told only when there is snow on the ground. There's a doozy of an access control problem, unless you take the cheap way out and declare that there is always snow on the ground somewhere.

Australian Aboriginese are

[EEPROMS]

anything but primitive. Often westerners (including me) upon seeing these people just see someone who lives a primitive and alien lifestyle. Over the years my whole view of the environment and our relationship with the land and each other has been completely been revised thanks to the knowledge gained gained from these true Australians. When western settlers first visited Australia all they saw were trees and bushes and no agriculture. The reality is far different in fact the Aborigines have for thousands of years been cultivating the land, food is everywhere but a westerner would starve unless shown the food they were standing on. Using fire management and spreading seeds (selection) Australian aborigines created a traveling smorgasboard that spanned thousands of miles. To have such a complex agricultural system (that puts western agricultural methods to shame in an environmental comparison) one must also have a very complex social system based on respect not just for the living but the dead. Many of you who eat your plastic food and live your broken sitcom social lives will sit back and laugh at such a people but the reality is they are laughing at us but are to honorable to tell us. If your after more info go watch a documentary series called "The Bush Tucker Man" [abc.net.au], well worth watching and a real eye opener.

Images of deceased persons

[TapeCutter]

Precisely, this is why some TV programs over here warn aboriginal and torres straight islanders that "this program may contain images of deceased persons".