ºù«Ӱҵ

Everyone in the world knows my voice, but no one knows it’s mine.

Difang Duana, Amis singer

 Quoted in

Difang Duana (Chinese name Kuo Ying-Nan) was talking about singing for a researcher who wanted to use the recording for teaching and research purposes in 1978. Over the next couple of decades, though, that recording took on a life of its own. In 1993, Michael Cretu (aka Enigma) released ‘Song of Innocence’, a track that features Duana and his wife Igay (Kuo Shin-chu) in over 2 minutes of a 4 minute and 15 second song. The names of the Amis singers and the source of the recording were uncredited, and Michael Cretu was listed as the sole creator. ‘Song of Innocence’ topped song charts in North America and Europe, was featured in television programming, and was selected by the International Olympic Committee for use in promoting the 1996 Olympics. In short, ‘Return to Innocence’ circulated widely and made a lot of money for just about everyone other than the Duanas.

Ethnomusicologists have long been aware that the recordings we make in the field have the potential to attract the interest of individuals who don’t have an interest in our research. Songs get taken and repurposed, separated from sources with creators going unacknowledged and uncompensated for their art, their knowledge, and their intellectual property. And the stakes have never been higher – for us and our partners. When the Duanas were separated from their voices, the internet wasn’t really a thing. Extracting their voices required trawling analogue carriers. Now, digital repositories and easy file sharing ups the potential for unforeseen usage – to say nothing of how large language-models are harvesting and repurposing data from all corners of the digital world. We need to be responsible. We need to be ethical. But we also need to respond to calls for public accountability and greater openness in our research.

It’s not just ethnomusicologists who deal with these issues. This is a challenge that exists across disciplines, though surfaces most clearly when we’re talking about creative methods and practices, ethnography, and participant-led research. Doing participatory research – in any discipline – requires consideration of who owns knowledge and how we can better recognise the rights of contributors who exist outside of university structures.

In June 2024, the Participatory Research Network brought together a cross section of researchers, research support services, and administrators for an . Featuring presentations and dialogues from legal specialists, TUoS professional services, and researchers at all career stages, the workshop was a first step in addressing how siloed knowledge can be brought together to find solutions that benefit us all. 

The Roundtable

, a specialist in Intellectual Property Law and Data Protection in the UK’s Heritage Sector, set the stage for the day with an introduction to different types of intellectual property, data protection and types of personal data, and how these legal frameworks intersect in the context of open research and licensing. She suggested that there are (at least!) ten major challenges for researchers to navigate in the current regulatory and policy environment:

• Determining who owns what rights in collaboratively created works
• How to navigate the multiplicity of rights and legal issues entangled in media rich content
• The hierarchy of legal frameworks – data protection trumps copyright
• How to navigate powers dynamics when seeking informed consent from participants and partners
• Incompatibilities between data protection and Creative Commons licences
• Ethical prerogatives, copyright, and data protection protocols are no not always compatible, giving rise to orphan works
• Finding strategies for crediting multiple contributors that are compatible with data protection issues
• Determining what usages count as non-commercial
• Building sustainable approaches to seeking rights and resourcing rights clearance
• Retention of personal data, especially how to handle consent by and for children and parental consent into the future.

Download Naomi's slides (PDF, 3MB) 

Many of these issues were taken up by a panel of experts from across TUoS, who all weighed in on the major challenges and opportunities they encounter in their roles.

• Ric Campbell (Research Data Steward, Scholarly Communications Team, The University Library) represented Open Research at ºù«Ӱҵ. He talked about the assumptions that researchers make about the desirability of anonymity. Thinking early in the research design process about how data protection and consent will be managed enables production of data that is more likely to be .
• Kate O'Neill (Scholarly Licensing Manager, The University Library) represented the library’s copyright and licensing team. She talked about the need to critically engage with consent templates and the statements they make about rights assignment. This is boilerplate text that may not be appropriate for all research contexts or the needs of partners and participants.
• Lindsay Unwin (Research Ethics & Integrity Manager, Research, Partnerships and Innovation) talked about informed consent as an iterative process that doesn’t stop with a form, especially in participatory research contexts. Maintaining open communication, clearly documenting discussions related to consent, data protection, and rights is key.
• Greg Oldfield (Head of Public Engagement & Impact) talked about opportunities to build relationships outside of TUoS with public engagement platforms (like Festival of the Mind). Careful negotiation of  to clearly identify who owns intellectual property rights and how licensing will be handled into the future is an important aspect of building positive lasting relationships.
• Luke Hilton (Knowledge Exchange Lead, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Research, Partnerships and Innovation) returned to the topic of contracts, emphasising the need to check in with TUoS contracts team early on in the process of planning a partnership to discuss how intellectual property rights arising from the project will be negotiated fairly and sustainably. Granting bodies, as well, may impose conditions on how rights ownership needs to be handled.

Discussion in the room drilled down on the complexity of the legal and policy frameworks, leading many people to ask how we might effectively communicate with our partners and participants about the ins and outs of their rights when we, as researchers and research support staff, may sometimes struggle to comprehend the full range of challenges.

Relevant services at the University

• Open Research

• Research, Partnerships and Innovation

• Research Ethics & Integrity

• Copyright

Access Folk Case Study

Access Folk is just one of the projects at TUoS that is working to navigate intellectual property and data protection laws in the context of doing participatory research that is as open as possible. They shared a case study that highlighted the systems and people at TUoS who support these goals, as well as some of the processes they’ve built into their research.

is a UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship led by Professor Fay Hield, aiming to explore the place of folk singing in contemporary England. The project seeks to understand how people engage with their cultural heritage through song and how to facilitate broader participation in folk singing. 

Access Folk offers  to individuals and organisations throughout England. These grants provide funding for folk singing activities that address access issues within their communities. By collaborating with partners, Access Folk aims to understand the impact of interventions, identify facilitating factors, and develop resources for broader adoption. 

Making field recordings has long been a key methodology in ethnomusicological research – understanding why and how people make music, after all, is difficult with text-only descriptions! However, ethical concerns, intellectual property rights, and data privacy regulations pose challenges. Access Folk is addressing these issues in a variety of ways, including:

• Seeking informed consent from those being recorded and working with partners to ensure clear signage about their recording policies are posted at public events.
• Sharing  about Media Uploads, Consent, and Reuse with partners and participants.
• Having an intake policy for all media that partners and participants share. Doing due diligence involves recording relevant metadata related to rights, ownership, and licensing.
• Making our data, methods, and other outputs as open as possible – and restricting access to data that has rights that can’t be cleared or that compromises the personal data of participants.

Access Folk raised four questions related to doing participatory research that involves creative and ethnographic research:

• Rights management: How do we responsibly manage and protect our partners rights? Exploring options like  licensing as an alternative to assigning Intellectual Property Rights to TUoS is one way of ensuring that partners and participants are protected.
• Data protection: Should our participants always be anonymous? Building consent processes that enable partners and participants to make informed decisions about whether being identifiable or anonymous recognises the many different contexts in which research happens.
• Infrastructure: What infrastructure needs to be in place to support data sets that aren’t text based? Exploring options like  for data repositories is one way of reducing barriers for sharing data with complex intellectual property rights, while also ensuring that creators are compensated for their labour.
• And partnerships: How might we find ways of treating our partners as true equals in our relationships? Regularly reviewing our processes and considering how researcher-led approaches to consent and licensing may impose labour or barriers to external partners participating in knowledge production.

Dialogues 

Dialogues between researchers, support services, and our external guests highlighted something we suspected: the tremendous amount of often-siloed knowledge that exists about intellectual property rights, data protection, and research ethics and methods that are relevant to anyone undertaking or supporting participatory research. Contributions from members of research services, PGRs, ECRs, and experienced researchers from a variety of disciplines highlighted a number of key questions and challenges:

• Who owns collaboratively created works? How do we express and protect that ownership?
• How do we effectively explain Intellectual Property Rights and Data Protection to our partners and participants? Especially when the laws are already hard to understand?
• How long should we retain personal data, especially when there are potentially intellectual property rights that need to be considered long into the future?
• Ethical and rigorous research doesn’t always have to be anonymous!
• Intellectual property law isn’t necessarily compatible with non-western knowledge systems
• Renegotiating contracts and templates to protect partners and participants
• How can university systems better recognise non-text-based data sets (e.g., through streaming licences on data repositories)?
• Recording and retaining institutional knowledge
• Difficult to navigate all of the research support services that are implicated in designing research that supports intellectual property rights and protects data.

This generated a list of resources to explore. These are compiled in a living document. 

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