Why does digitization transfer the ownership?   

Why This Matters

Within Bvlbancha Public Access' relationships, projects, and within our Indigenous lived experience, we interact with Indigenous Gulf Coast communities. The intensity and visibility of regional change has created an influx of research projects, artists, journalists, and climate solvers engaged in research and storytelling around lived experiences within South Louisiana. These projects often extract time, effort, knowledge, emotions, and stories. This extraction of labor is considered an exchange or investment in research, reports, news, or other endeavors with the potential for impact. Often, this potential for impact fails to materialize into significant quality of life changes in return for inter-generational lived knowledge. 

BPA believes we can re-imagine how storytelling and information gathering can be made to be immediately equitable. We see this specific, localized issue within the Gulf South Indigenous communities as a patterned issue of data extraction across minoritized global communities who engage in inequitable intellectual knowledge transfer within research, journalism, and media production activities. 

How it Works

Uke’, the Uma word for “water,” and a transliterative pun of “ok.” 

The Uke’ Contracting System is a packaged Joint Authorship Agreement, Copyright Assignment, and Copyright Licensing Agreement to assist those involved in interviews or media co-creation to ensure that the rights to the content fully belong to the knowledge owner and that the material is licensed in a relational way. The Uke’ Contracting System reimagines how storytelling and information gathering can be made immediately equitable. The system provides a utility to define sole ownership of digital content to the knowledge holder at the initial fixation of copyright for sound, video, and image recordings. After the copyright is defined, the owner can then choose to license the work to others for specific and limited uses. These limited licenses requires reevaluation and relicensing with any new use. 

Uke 2.0

Test a Draft

Uke' 2.0 is currently in a soft launch/beta test as we work out a few form flows. If you want to be part of the development, you can download a draft below, use as you wish and email us with any feedback/revisions/ideas. 

If you rather the previous version, click here for Uke 1.0

Use

The Uke’ Contracting System is free and open access through Bvlbancha Public Access under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The Uke’ Contracting System contributors believe in promoting accessibility to the legal system, increasing creators’ and artists’ agency over their intellectual property, and supporting Indigenous data sovereignty. Through the continued iteration of this contract, we hope to further these goals for all.