The twenty-first century has ushered in new debates and social movements that aim to structure how culture is produced, owned, and distributed. At one side, open-knowledge advocates seek greater freedom for finding, distributing, using, and reusing information. On the other hand, traditional-knowledge rights advocates seek to protect certain forms of knowledge from appropriation and exploitation and seek recognition for communal and culturally situated notions of heritage and intellectual property. Understanding and bridging the tension between these movements represents a vital and significant challenge. This paper explores possible areas of where these seemingly divergent goals may converge, centered on the Creative Commons concept of some rights reserved. We argue that this concept can be extended into areas where scientific disciplines intersect with traditional *Alexandria Archive Institute/ArchaeoCommons.
285knowledge. This model can help build a voluntary framework for negotiating more equitable and open communication between field researchers and diverse stakeholding communities.We are developing organizational and technological methods to enhance data sharing for research in both the social and environmental sciences. These challenges include information quality control, protections for sensitive data (such as the specific locations of archaeological sites and their vulnerabilities to looting), copyright issues, incentives to share data, and financial sustainability. Initially, we had expected to simply mimic preexisting, off-the-shelf solutions for such areas as terms and conditions, copyright and data-accession policies, and procedures for handling disputes. We quickly learned that the intellectual-property status of these types of content represent a challenge where there are few solutions readily at hand.At the heart of this problem is the tension between the potential for universal access and enhanced creative possibilities of digital content and the need to ensure that the sources of digital content benefit from these new options. For example, publishing an ethnomusicology study on the World Wide Web can vastly increase the audience of the study and spark creative reapplications of the source content, in this case music. At the same time, because online data are so easily replicated, distributed, and manipulated, this content is at risk of appropriation and exploitative uses. Both the researcher who performed the study and members of the indigenous society whose music she collected stand to both benefit and suffer from the power of online dissemination. These issues are widely recognized and debated. In our attempt to explore these issues, we found two prominent movements with very different perspectives, models, and goals. The goal of the traditional-knowledge movement is to protect certain forms of knowledge from unfair exploitation. 1 This movement emphasizes the need to respect the rights and claims of disadvantaged communities; as such, it seeks recognition for communal and culturally situated...
