Kaitiakitanga Māori Data Sovereignty Licences | Hacker News Reader

Kaitiakitanga Māori Data Sovereignty Licences

taiuru.maori.nz

67 pointsedent79 comments

They should reconsider publishing on github, because their ideas clash pretty heavily with github's ideas of what they are entitled to.

What is this? Is this an official government policy? How is a publisher supposed to identify if someone is Maori?

This part is where the author explains his views on current government policy: https://www.taiuru.maori.nz/maori-data-sovereignty-licences/...

It's just a proposal by an academic. Probably intended to spark a conversation, as NZ is reviewing its privacy and data sovereignty law.

I don't think it's official going by other commenters but as background,

They're probably making the argument that their information is mana (spirit~) and therefore tapu (sacred/don't touch).

I don't think many follow it but in traditional Maori culture you're not even allowed to let someone get ahold of your cut hair or nail clippings because they contain your mana and someone could curse you if they get ahold of it.

https://teara.govt.nz/en/te-ao-marama-the-natural-world/page...

Edit:

More or less, yes

> 2.1 Context. All data has a whakapapa (genealogy) and a mauri.

> They're probably making the argument that their information is mana (spirit~) and therefore tapu (sacred/don't touch).

Usually spelled "taboo".

Tapu is a Maori word, it's a bit more nuanced / not quite the same as taboo but close. It's not like nobody can touch, just not everyone can touch. And not really about touch at all but it's part of it.

It's close because it's the same word. But in English we spell it "taboo". Would you say "colour is a British word, it's not quite the same as color but it's close"?

Māori is a completely separate language from English. Although it uses the English alphabet with some accents.

The word tapu has completely different etymology than taboo.

https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?idiom=0&phrase=0&prover...

> The word tapu has completely different etymology than taboo.

No, it doesn't. What do you think the etymology of taboo is?

It is apparently from Tongan or Fijian words, not Maori words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo#Etymology

I think it's weird to try and correct a person using the accurate cultural terms with a mis-hearing of some european in the 1700s. If anything "tapu" is the technically correct term when referring to a concept in the context of Maori culture specifically, and taboo is a shitty mishearing of a foreigner of a different language.

Similar to say, if I was talking about java's methods. In C# they're functions. But since I'm talking about Java, and specifically Java's basic behavior, method is the correct technical terminology to signify the context of what I'm talking about. It'd be weird for a C# person to show up, tell me that "actually, these are functions", if I'm saying "in Java, X is called a method".

> It is apparently from Tongan or Fijian words, not Maori words.

All of the Polynesian languages are closely related, to the extent that many of them are mutually intelligible. A simple shift in phonology, like /p/ to /b/, isn't enough to render /tapu/ and /tabu/ different words. The connotations of those words may differ from one culture to another, but the basic concept is the same.

But it is true that the word "taboo" came from a foreigner talking about Tongan peoples beliefs, which is important when the topic we're trying to talk about is Maori beliefs. Even if Maori and Tonga people are closely related in culture, they are not the same culture and Tonga people do not have the same co-sovereignity agreements over New Zealand that Maori do.

They're part of the same language family, but pretty far apart. The Lithuanian, Latin, and Saskrit words for fire are ugnis, ignis, and agni. Are they the same word? Nah. They just share an ancestor. Same thing with tapu and taboo. They are for sure related but if we're gonna talk about the Māori concept and not the English or Fijian one we can signal that so easily by calling it tapu, not taboo.

OP is not writing an English word.

> Tapu is a Maori word

That the english word taboo is derived from it doesn't make them "the same word", since we don't use it the same way in English.

The English word "guru" is derived from the Sanskrit word "guru" but their meanings couldn't be more different. In English it's used to mean someone who's really good at something, like a "digital marketing guru."

You need to stop, man. It's a different word.

It's not the same word mate. They're literally different words in different languages.

It's not a misspelling.

Colour and color are literally the same word, different spellings.

Tapu and taboo is not literally the same. They may have derived from the same thing but they are now, different words with different meanings.

Suggesting tapu is a misspelling of taboo is like suggesting "Koran" is a misspelling of the word "Bible".

No, literally always spelt tapu, a different word with completely different meaning and connotations than taboo.

The English word "taboo" actually comes from the Polynesian family of languages (tapua/tupua/tapu), of which Māori is a part.

The term has been reconstructed even further back to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and cognates exist across a large number of related languages. https://www.trussel2.com/acd/acd-s_t.htm#30099 Of course that doesn't mean it's used the same in all of them.

That it has origins in the same language family doesn’t make it the same word. Once again - it has a very different meaning to taboo.

The 2021 Ford F-150 comes from the same historical family as the Ford Pinto therefore they are the same car.

The last memo said all identity was fluid and pre defined identities were social constructs of the oppressors, so one must infer that one should say one identifies as Maori to be Maori.

See RFC7231 section 5.5.4 - User-Race header

> 6.1 Māori Data is ever only loan. Non Māori can not own Māori data.

Tomorrow: "80% of the world's publishers discover Maori heritage, re-incorporate in NZ"

> This comment is property of brown-eyes. Blue-eyes can never own this data.

That's an absolutely bananas concept. It's fine to tie something like a person's personal identifying data to themselves, isn't it absurd to have some racial/tribal restriction on a piece of information?

It’s ridiculous but companies have made their bed by abusing the collection of people’s data and using that data unscrupulously and insecurely. So, you know, I have little sympathy here for the companies.

Why are you bringing companies in to this? This is a straight up racial restriction which affects individuals.

Of course this is shortsighted and also impractical but it highlights the need for people to control their own data. Whether it’s this society referenced or another. It’s important that companies respect people’s data.

Because the most wide-scale abuse of people's data comes from corporations, not individuals.

A Maori corporation could "own" Maori data, as it would be Maori, owned by Maori.

It's obviously a racial thing, not about companies.

I tend to agree with you, but there are a lot of academics currently pushing variations of the concept articulated in the linked article.

The has been a decent amount of advocacy for IP rights for various forms "indigenous traditional knowledge" bubbling around academia and WIPO for years. Article 31 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) basically expanded the scope of that IP debate beyond "traditional knowledge" to new stuff created by indigenous peoples. New Zealand is currently pushing this area the hardest, but eventually most countries that ratify UNDRIP will end up with at least proposals in this area. The stomach in academia and some policy circles for pushing this stuff right now is pretty strong.

Under a western concept of ownership, yes. There are systems of ownership, particularly among tribal societies, where things are owned by a collective. The interface can get weird, but if you think of the tribe as a corporation that is its own legal entity distinct from the members it's not actually that foreign.

What I don't like about that concept is that it imposes restrictions on people in the tribe that I feel are unfair. If you want to share some of your Maori knowledge with a non-Maori how can you go about it? Do you need approval from 51% of all official members, or the board of directors or what?

I think that cultural heritage belongs to humanity as a whole, and even if it didn't then there would be plenty of people who would just take what they "inherit" from their ancestors and share it with the rest of the world.

There is a corporate analog here in the form of a non-disclosure agreement. If you don't want to be part of the Maori community anymore, you can leave, like you can quit your job at Apple, but you're still not allowed to share Apple's knowledge with anyone else.

But you don't opt-in to being Maori, nor can you opt-out.

If you say that you could just stop hanging out with other Maori then fine, but does that disinherit you from the cultural heritage?

I guess I’m just saying that your access to the cultural heritage can be contingent upon you following the rules (ie Don’t tell outsiders). If you break those rules, the community should be allowed to ostracize you within the bounds set by law (ie no burning your house down or anything).

Not only unfair, they're downright restrictive to growth. There's a reason that no civilization with such concepts of tribal ownership has developed into anything worthwhile, they're basically living the tragedy of the commons at its maximal level.

>There's a reason that no civilization with such concepts of tribal ownership has developed into anything worthwhile

Which civilizations are "worthwhile" and which are not?

Hard to say, but I'd argue getting past the iron age on their own is a good start for a metric.

Ascribing one person's position (the person suggesting sovereignity licenses) to be an examplar of how entire cultures haven't "developed into anything worthwhile" is racist.

Relevant XKCD comic, of course: https://xkcd.com/385/

I'm not familiar with the Maori in particular, but most traditional cultures prior to the Gutenberg revolution had special knowledge that they tried to keep to themselves. Typically there were a class of people who were responsible for both ensuring that the knowledge didn't get lost or become available to the wrong people. Typically learning this knowledge required first committing to guarding its secrecy, so I wouldn't agree it's an unfair restriction on the people who have it. It might not be useful for the culture in the long term, but then again it might. These cultures have seen some ages pass.

If the argument is just that everyone benefits when licenses are more free I wouldn't disagree, but having the option to impose different licenses doesn't seem like a bad thing. And whatever the details, that's what this boils down to, a particular set of restrictions on the use of a particular set of data.

I think your example is discarding too much of the context. Rather than considering this through a racial lens, I think it would be more accurate to view it as an act of cultural stewardship - where the cultural separation, as in many parts of the world, largely follows racial and tribal lines.

When thought of as a cultural act, it makes much more sense. Cultures implicitly lay claim to information i.e. their cultural heritage, all the time. It's also less surprising that you can find the concept itself "bananas", because the value system of your culture won't necessarily line up with that of other cultures and their stewards.

> Cultures implicitly lay claim to information i.e. their cultural heritage, all the time.

They do? How do you "own" cultural heritage? It sounds like the first step before accusing others of cultural robbery when they wear their hair a certain way or have a tattoo.

I get the impression that anyone being in favor for that kind of thing hasn't thought it through. If your ethnic group can lay claim to some hairstyle, the dominant group automatically gets to claim all the stuff they introduced you to. It's a bad trade to get to decide who can wear dread locks, but have to give up all the benefits of modern society.

>They do? How do you "own" cultural heritage?

Well, the most obvious route is the legal one. Lots of cultures have legislation protecting the authenticity of certain kinds of products, like food - even if those products can be reproduced exactly elsewhere. You are not allowed to call your homemade cheese "parmigiano", no matter its quality or ingredients, because the recipe is "owned" by the cheesemakers of an area around Parma.

There's even information ownership in fields which are ostensibly about physical things. Museums are full of objects whose historical value comes from the information they provide about the past - and in many places, that information is considered important enough for people to go to great lengths to make it available to the public. Countries often ban the export of historical artifacts, because it is felt that the public "own" the artifacts and the knowledge they can communicate.

They don't own the information/recipe, they own a trade mark. That's very different. You can absolutely make parmigiano, you just can't call it that.

For artifacts etc: it's about the physical items. I'm not aware of a nation outlawing e.g. discussion or reproduction of that artifact anywhere else in the world.

It is only bananas if you don't understand Maori culture.

In Maori culture there is no such thing as absolute property right. Things are not ever really owned. They are more like owned collectively and borrowed based on need.

Then western people came and gave them maori bosses couple trinkets which Maori thought is to borrow the property but westerners thought they are buying the property.

It is a bit complicated. You can read up on it in Francis's Fukuyama "The origins of political order"

I remember one Maori telling me "it's your house, but it (all) our land..." which seems like a perfect antidote to the capitalistic cancer of printing free money, giving it to (unethical) corporations and letting them gobble up so much space that we're homeless...ofc it doesn't quite work that way either

I think information and land have salient differences. It's not fair to say that I must be wrong because I just don't "get it".

But you clearly don’t get it, as your many posts in here show.

Maori ideas of custodianship are wildly different: https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2544-understanding...

How Māori is Māori? Where's the line drawn? Is it a one-drop rule or does there have to be some blood quantum? Otherwise, well, humans disperse and intermingle and at some point it's like asking who qualifies as a Visigoth, or an Etruscan.

This is addressed in the license.

well i think it' something like you have to be 1/64th blood to claim their land/benefits so maybe that's a start

Is this serious or is this some kind of joke?

Oh god, this is entirely out of context for 99.999% of users of this site. I don't see any productive conversation coming from this..

All I can say.. is NZ is based on a partnership, between the crown and Maori peoples. (setting asside bi-vs-multi-cultural-ism for the moment) The idea that sovereignty was never given up by Maori is a very important one. There is a lot of thought on decolonialism recently. While whole world is subsumed by machinations extreme free-market techno-capitalist and data hording algorithm trainers, The Author of this article is apparently thinking about this form within a Maori world view.

I can't really talk about it despite years of Highschool Tikanga and Reo classes, ect.. I dont think it makes much sense out of context..

on a side note I remember Richard stallman speaking at my University about intellectual property abolishment, and fielding a question about ownership rites of traditional Maori knowledge, which he completely didn't get.

Maybe he didn't get it.. or maybe you didn't like his answer?

No it really seemed that he and the questioner didn't understand each other's points.

Animism is the new mindfulness?

What is the target here? A lot of the points seem to address personal data collection by companies or the government, but they define Māori data very broadly as:

> data, information or knowledge in any format or medium, which is about, from, is produced by Māori Peoples

Do they mean to include inventions? Code? Works of art?

> The idea that sovereignty was never given up by Maori is a very important one. There is a lot of thought on decolonialism recently.

These are still pretty fringe views in NZ.

There are some groups that support separate institutions and legal systems for Maori but I wouldn't say that's anywhere near a majority view.

It isn’t that fringe. Look at healthcare, where the abysmal results delivered to Maori (see the below Hauora report) are looking likely to result in a radical change in funding and the establishment of The Maori Health Authority.

I work in health and am not Maori. Reading a little into health disparities was a ‘holy shit’ moment for me. We do very poorly.

https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/news/report-on-stage-one-of...

https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/establishment-new-māori-...

It’s not fringe, it’s the legal bedrock of NZ’s constitution.

It’s not about separate, it’s about the crown entering into a legal treaty then dishonouring it because lol Great Britain.

Yes but unfortunately they are fringe ideas that our PM and her cabinet appear to subscribe to - although they refuse to explicitly say so.

Ugh, it’s quite literally the founding constitution and basis for NZ. Describing mana whenua as ‘Fringe’ is racist and insulting.

I'm sorry but you're simply not right, and going around calling everyone who disagrees with you "racist" won't make you any more right.

How am I “not right”?

Well for one your certainty about the constitutional basis of our nation, which has been in dispute since the signing of the treaty.

Your certainty that it's in disupte is misguided. It's not. There's a treaty signed which establishes joint soverignty over Aotearoa and it was signed in good faith by both parties. The crown and the NZ govt. have ignored it since it was signed, but that doesn't mean the foundation isn't there.

https://aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz/tears-of-rangi/ I'd recommend reading this, it covers the history of the period of the signing of the the Treaty of Waitangi in a lot of depth.

> There's a treaty signed which establishes joint soverignty over Aotearoa and it was signed in good faith by both parties.

It's a fairly flawed 1 page document with two incompatible translations signed 181 years ago. There's certainly still plenty of debate over how much sovereignty Maori are granted by the treaty, how that would be implemented, and how relevant it is in the modern context.

Dispute over what it means, yes, like all legal documents. But my initial reply was to a poster describing it as 'fringe'. It is anything but.

You don't think the treaty is in dispute? There's literally an entire tribunal whose only remit is to adjudicate treaty disputes. Treaty disputes have been in the news on a regular basis for decades.

See my other comment. It very much exists and is very much the basis for NZ law. You said it was 'fringe': it isn't.

Reminds me of time cube

ok I am now resolved to try and never look at HN comments again. Been really trying, but at this point I think the general chauvinism is pretty invariable. nothing to save here anymore

> This article introduces six new licence to protect Māori Data and recognise Māori Data Sovereignty rights today and for the next 1000 years.

I'd be willing to bet everything I have and will ever own that there won't be humans as the predominant form of intelligence in 1,000 years.

We'll either kill ourselves (or destroy civilization irreparably such that this doesn't matter), introduce AGI that outperforms and outlives us, or evolve our bodies into something better and longer lasting (brain uploads, etc.)

The other possibility, though remote, is we find ourselves at the mercy of some form of advanced extraterrestrial life. What ever should come after is anyone's guess, but it would mean we would be of lesser intelligence in the universe by comparison.

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