"Ralph Lauren has apologized after the wife of Mexico's president accused the luxury US clothes brand of plagiarizing indigenous designs, which she described as an appropriation of the work of the country's pre-Hispanic cultures."
Ethically-tangled aspects of 21st century societies and cultures. In the vein of Charles Darwin’s 1859 “entangled bank” metaphor—a complex and evolving digital ecosystem of difference and dependence, where humans, technologies, ethics, law, policy, data, and information converge and diverge. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Saturday, October 22, 2022
Friday, December 3, 2021
Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking.; The New York Times, November 29, 2021
Priya Krishna , The New York Times; Who Owns a Recipe? A Plagiarism Claim Has Cookbook Authors Asking.
U.S. copyright law protects all kinds of creative material, but recipe creators are mostly powerless in an age and a business that are all about sharing.
"U.S. copyright law seeks to protect “original works of authorship” by barring unauthorized copying of all kinds of creative material: sheet music, poetry, architectural works, paintings and even computer software.
But recipes are much harder to protect. This is a reason they frequently reappear, often word for word, in one book or blog after another.
Cookbook writers who believe that their work has been plagiarized have few options beyond confronting the offender or airing their grievances online. “It is more of an ethical issue than it is a legal issue,” said Lynn Oberlander, a media lawyer in New York City...
“The whole history of American cookbook publishing is based on borrowing and sharing,” said Bonnie Slotnick, the owner of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, an antique bookstore in the East Village of Manhattan...
Mr. Bailey said many cookbook authors are used to the free exchange of ideas on social media, and may not be conscious of the importance of giving credit. “It has become so tempting in this environment to just take rather than to create,” he said."
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
The Death of a Fake Twitter Personality Reveals the Systemic Rot of Academia; Medium, August 11, 2020
"The creation of such an identity — as multiple Native scholars and writers have pointed out — isn’t just deeply disrespectful to the small community of Natives in academia, and it doesn’t just play into a gross American tradition of appropriation. It’s also coming at a time when Native people are being killed by Covid-19 at 19 times the rate of all other populations combined in New Mexico alone. Before McLaughlin was unmasked, Duarte says, she had been avoiding social media, which for those with family in the Four Corners region of the Southwest felt like a rolling obituary. She and Washuta both recalled hearing the news that a Native colleague had died and instantly wondering if it was someone they knew. Killing off a fake Native account through Covid-19 registers as doubly cruel.
“The behavior of this individual Dr. McLaughlin eclipses the actual work of Native colleagues,” Duarte says, as well as the struggles of LGTBQ Native people who themselves suffer disproportionate rates of violence. “It sort of feels like being rendered invisible many times over.”"
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Death threats against the author of ‘American Dirt’ threaten us all; The Washington Post, January 30, 2020
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Māori anger as Air New Zealand seeks to trademark 'Kia Ora' logo; The Guardian, September 12, 2019
"New Zealand’s national carrier, Air New Zealand, has offended the country’s Māori people by attempting to trademark an image of the words “kia ora”; the greeting for hello."
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Indigenous Knowledge Misappropriation: The Case Of The Zia Sun Symbol Explained At WIPO; Intellectual Property Watch, December 11, 2018
"The three panellists mentioned the importance of the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples [pdf], and in particular Article 31, which asserts the right of indigenous peoples to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, TK and TCEs, and the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over their cultural heritage, TK, and TCEs.
Commenting on the Zia case, June Lorenzo, a lawyer advocating in tribal and domestic courts and legislative and international human rights bodies, said in the late 1890s, Zia was at a very vulnerable point, as many other tribes were. A number of archaeologists came and took “what they could because they thought we were going to disappear as a civilisation,” she said, noting that the stolen pot was repatriated in 2000 or 2002.
In 1925, when the Zia symbol was adopted by the state of New Mexico, the Zia were not even considered as citizens of the United States, she said, and could not vote. “So the idea that they should have objected to this [ the use of the symbol] in 1925 … is just absurd.”"