It is not Dance, is Data: Gearing Ethical Circulation of Intangible Cultural Heritage practices in the Digital Space

Jorge Yánez, Amel Fraisse


Abstract
The documentation, protection and dissemination of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in the digital age pose significant theoretical, technological and legal challenges. Through a multidisciplinary lens, this paper presents new approaches for collecting, documenting, encrypting and protecting ICH-related data for more ethical circulation. Human-movement recognition technologies such as motion capture, allows for the recording, extraction and reproduction of human movement with unprecedented precision. The once indistinguishable or hard-to-trace reproduction of dance steps between their creators and unauthorized third parties becomes patent through the transmission of embodied knowledge, but in the form of data. This new battlefield prompted by digital technologies only adds to the disputes within the creative industries, in terms of authorship, ownership and commodification of body language. For the sake of this paper, we are aiming to disentangle the various layers present in the process of digitisation of the dancing body, to identify its by-products as well as the possible arising ownership rights that might entail. ”Who owns what?”, the basic premise of intellectual property law, is transposed, in this case, onto the various types of data generated when intangible cultural heritage, in the form of dance, is digitised through motion capture and encrypted with blockchain technologies.
Anthology ID:
2022.legal-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Ethical and Legal Issues in Human Language Technologies and Multilingual De-Identification of Sensitive Data In Language Resources within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Ingo Siegert, Mickael Rigault, Victoria Arranz
Venue:
LEGAL
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
84–91
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.legal-1.15
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jorge Yánez and Amel Fraisse. 2022. It is not Dance, is Data: Gearing Ethical Circulation of Intangible Cultural Heritage practices in the Digital Space. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Ethical and Legal Issues in Human Language Technologies and Multilingual De-Identification of Sensitive Data In Language Resources within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 84–91, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
It is not Dance, is Data: Gearing Ethical Circulation of Intangible Cultural Heritage practices in the Digital Space (Yánez & Fraisse, LEGAL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.legal-1.15.pdf