IGF 2019 – Day 3 – Estrel Saal C – BPF on Local Content

>> SPEAKER:  We should start with warning you all.  This is the BPF on local content, and it's not the first time there is a best practice on one of these issues.  It started in 2014, as you read in the document.

And it's an initiative which is quite important because deals with the issues that are crucial and was a concern since the document in 2005 in strengthening local cultures, additional languages, and so on, and preserving culture as well.

I think this is the ‑‑ there was a VPS in local content in 2014 and 2017 and last year's as well, but I think this is the first time we are trying to emphasize not only the questions of creation, learning about producing content and so on, but also preserving local culture, local cultural assets, and heritage, local heritage, the indigenal languages and so on.  The question of preservation is quite important and should be emphasized this year.

We have an interesting panel and the moderator doesn't want to talk much because we have lots of people to speak and not too much time.  So I would right away give the floor to our first speaker, which is Elena Perotti.

We will try to have the speakers talk for about five minutes or six minutes each.  We'll try to finish in about one hour the round of speakers and give them about ten minutes to interact, ask questions to each other, comment on their speech, et cetera, and then we would open the floor to anyone else who would like to speak.  So that's the format.  Simple.

Do we need to do a presentation of the report first, or you have read it?

>> SPEAKER:  Can I just go over the main issues that came out?

>> THE MODERATOR:  Yes, and maybe at least the recommendations.

>> SPEAKER:  I'll try, but we don't necessarily need to look at that.  I just wanted to ‑‑ firstly, the process of the BPF, the ideas that one works intercessionally, so when we started the work after we identified this topic of how local content and heritage is threatened or challenged by shifts in political and other forms of instability, we asked for input from the community.  And how many of you actually sent some content into the report?

That's not bad.  But actually overall we got 36 contributions, and they were very rich contributions.  I really ‑‑ I supported two BPFs.  I also supported the gender and access BPF, this access forum.  The content that we received for this particular access forum was of really high quality.

So I won't present the report because you can read it.  I just want to go through the categories of issues that people identified.  Marginalization of local languages and expression.  That came up as a clear issue, but also as an issue which doesn't standalone.  And in some context, some communities have to sometimes make choices between more social and economic opportunity and preserving local language and culture.  So how social inequality interacts with preserving identity and heritage came up as an issue.

Next, there was the whole issue of documenting culture, traditions and history but embed it in everyday life.  There are many programs where there are high tech digitizations of temples, for example, or heritage sites, but connecting that form of preservation with people's lived experience in those areas and what significance their heritage has for them, that's much more complex than just putting up a high end 3D, you know, visualization of an ancient structure.

Then power and political control clearly is an issue in terms of denying or rewriting history, denying people's experiences, but what also was ‑‑ came up is some people said that digitization in itself has enormous potential, but it can also be a form of selective storytelling, selective ‑‑ you know, we always say those who win the wars tell the stories.  Maybe we can say those have the power to digitize tell the stories.  So I thought that was a very interesting input.

Then the whole notion of irreversible loss and disappearance of documentary heritage, lack of resources for preservation.  And also in the form of digital preservation, uncertainty.  There were contributors appointed that today, in terms of available storage technology, paper is still a more enduring form of preservation than any existing digital means.  So maybe it will come, but at the moment, optical disc, even high‑end sophisticated optical discs are not likely to last as long as the dead sea scrolls did, for example.

And then copyright.  Copyright capacities, resources, standards, that also came up in the assistant of issues.  Some contributors pointed out that copyright and the protection of copyright can actually help preserve content and heritage, and then others pointed out that it's a real barrier.  The time and money that has to be spent if a local community is trying to digitize content of which some else holds the copyright can actually be inhibitor.  So finding ways around the positive aspects of it but also overcoming the limitations.

And then the fact that technology is a double edged sword in the context of this particular conversation.  It's a way of keeping local languages alive and digitizing local content, but it also is a way of acculturation, globalization, and you have to engage both those.  And you can't value the one necessarily more than the other because people's lived experiences are vital.  And as one contributor pointed out, you don't want to preserve language in such a way that it actually accelerates the death of it.  Sometimes the act of preservation can also be an act of declaring that a language has died.  It's a dead language so we have to now preserve it.

And then hostility and bias amongst those in power, that can have a real impact.  And power shifts can impact as well on the sustainability.  You might have a public administration that's very interested in preserving one particular culture because they feel politically aligned with that particular language or culture.  And then you have a shift in political power, and then resources for that initiative can disappear.

So that's really it.  I won't dwell on the recommendations.  We don't have that many recommendations.  And we want the recommendations to come from you, and we don't have to have all our recommendations finalized today.  We still have a few more days for you if you want to reflect and send me some input up to Monday, maybe Tuesday morning, that's fine.

But we do need you to think of, as Carlos said, about the future, what we should focus on next year, and I would like us to have a program of work now, as opposed to deciding in August or September.  But also recommendations to come up in the conversation today would be very helpful.

Thanks very much.  So back to you.

>> ELENA PEROTTI:  Thank you very much.  So I am Elena Perotti.  I work for the Word Association News Media, which governors all the news media in the world, and I thank you all to inviting me to this local forum.

We believe that local news has a vital importance in supporting an informed and politically active local citizen rink.  The challenges of the industry of the news media that the industry has encountered in the economy have been particularly dire in the case of local newspapers.

Because indeed the constant and deep shrinking of print advertising revenues, the limited access to online advertising, in the case of ‑‑ in the fiercest competition, giants have strangled the local news.  Local competitors are extremely vulnerable.

Adapting to the digital environment has been a great struggle for local news media, but some of them have found their best voice in this occasion.

The stories among locals belong to the members who were able to embark in digital transportation into multiplatform media, sometimes venturing to new business areas too.  Often, what insured was a deep knowledge of the audience and a capable use of data.  And the key words for successful local publications remain engagement and quality content.

See I brought you a couple of examples.  In Spain, for example, Barcelona based newspaper has taken an audience first approach that insured encouraging results for its local publication.  They had over a 20 percent increase in the last couple of years where the section was experiencing a 22 percent fall overall.

Ara which means now is a newspaper that began in 2010, coinciding with elections.  And it is the third most recent daily newspaper and the most read exclusively in the language.

In 2015 ‑‑ now more than 60 percent of their income from the revenues come from sub scribers and readers.  Their strategy is to serve targeted audiences with targeted content.  They work on their diverse offering.  They include a comic newspaper or artists only newspapers and so on.

The effect of bringing this extremely focused interested online is that their audiences feel even more the situation of being a community.  They really feel that they're a family all together gathered around these interests.  And this ultimately increases the value of being a sub scriber and encourages subscriptions.

In the online event, there are engagements of the customer in their preferred platforms.  And like many other newspaper publishers, maintains high standards of quality in their print products which is what drives the brand recognition and the effects across the whole platform.  So as we like to say, digital first and print later and better.

Another example I brought to you comes from India, the leading printing house.  It prints in five languages across 15 states.  It includes India's leading Hindi newspaper with 73 million readers.  The content credibility once again drives the digital presence.  The group director specifies that language is beyond the power of growth and digital in India, which is what we see in the report.  And of course mobile devices are the leading point of access for the consumption of online information.

There's a great connect with the language readers and their print remains amongst the leaders with about 21 million unique users.

Print's unique ability to localize and customize along with a reach helps endure readers and sets into new products on digital platforms and also on conventional revenue sources, building on the brand's content credibility and the unique data they have access to.

As an example of new products they are exploring, the group launched onlymyhealth.com, which is a top website with health industry with 8.6 million users.  And another one is one of the fastest growing Indian education sites with over 8 million unique visitors.

I close by saying that an honorable mention should be reserved to the literacy programs launched in several local media.  We have a news leader network, and we observed that some of the most interesting initiatives are being launched locally, just like our best practice for outcome reports.  Literacy is one of the answers that keep local cultures engaged.  And literacy media has an opportunity to bring predigitive writers along with them and help cross the boundaries between digital and traditional media.

So the keywords for us are know your audiences, adapt them online, and try to teach as much as you can the interest of your product.  Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Okay.  Thank you.

Elena has to leave soon, so I would before passing to the second speaker, ask you if there is any question to her, because she might leave and not be able to participate later.

No?

So the second ‑‑ sorry.  Please, please.  Go ahead.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I have a nasty question.  There are programs made by big giants, the one that is wrapped in the business model of the local media, to ‑‑ supposed to help local media, and usually in exchange, they ask for the data of the newspapers and of the readers.  What is the approach of the federation of newspapers on that?

>> ELENA PEROTTI:  That is a very interesting phenomenon.  It is true, they have been developing programs that supposedly help local media.  I wouldn't know whether in the end they steal the data, but we know that very likely they do that.  What I did notice is that they use their connection with local media very often for lobbying purposes.  So particularly in the United States, for example, I saw this happening.

They are facing the news media alliance which is news media association that garths all of the national media in the U.S. in front of Congress for different things, and particularly antitrust.  They dropped entirely any relation with them and went straight to the local media, to the local news media, which have a different association and which have been speaking very highly of both Google and Facebook as if they were saving the world.

So I think that it is ‑‑ what I definitely know from first‑hand is that the tech giants are going local in order to try and defend themselves from whatever attacks can come from the policies of the big trade associations.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Okay.  Thiago Novaes from Brazil, researching policy communications with you.  If can open with a brief description.

>> THIAGO NOVAES:  Thank you, Carlos.

Good morning, everyone.  It's a pleasure to be here.  Thanks for the invitation.  Well, I have been working with indigenous groups in Brazil for a long time, 15 years, and I would like to present a little bit about my experience with is a comparative responsibility for installing communication infractures across Brazil.

We won last year an award and made a public call and received more than 50 names of installing infrastructure and I have been coordinating installations in the Amazon.

We are currently working with three indigenous groups, and I would like also to address a few points on access which I think is a major issue in our experience.

So dealing with indigenous communities, for you to have an idea, Brazil has more than 1 million individuals as indengenals, self defined as indigenous, and they speak more than 170 different language.

But it's only ten percent of the regional language that was spoken in 1,500 when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil.  So to preserve this ten percent of language, it's a kind of a huge issue now, but it's very normal, very common, to find indengenals that speaks more than one language because a man should many times speak the language of his father and also the language of his wife.

So I didn't tell very normal to have indigenous groups that are able to speak 3 to five language.

So dealing with this, we are invoking them to use ‑‑ engaged in normality.  It's been liked to a pen drive.  And to use it as a local metric, it's very ‑‑ it's for literal people, software is the best way to approach technology because it also enables to adapt to very old computers.

So for software ‑‑ it can be adapted to different conditions.  So this way, this will be one of the first recommendations to really enable people to use software, which they don't have any contact with technology, this would be the best option to introduce.

The second recommendation would be to increase the awareness of orality, how to deal with it.  And a specific that maybe to ‑‑ are really nice.  For example, we deal with a lot of mobiles.  But to see a mobile like this, it is a 2G mobile, which is very cheap, is able to record voice, is able to receive FN.  It's able to do Bluetooth, and the camera is not good.  But what's the importance of a camera if we are dealing with mostly orality or mostly speech.

And this device costs $10, so it could be really ‑‑ we are working with this with designing our proper appropriation of this kind of technology ‑‑ low tech technology.

And to finish my brief intervention, I would like to address the issue of accessing spectrum.  Local communities in the Amazon, as in many other places, we have a big issue with the access spectrum because it is assigned for national enterprise.  And of course we have much intercept in providing local services for just small groups of indengenals.  So we are defending in the idea an idea for free spectrum which is in one side an understanding of spectrum as an environmental group, which means it's not private nor public.

Because in the end, spectrum is locally used so it has a lot to do with body also, understanding impact in human bodies.  So it's a different approach.  We have the article 225, which deals with environmental goods.  And the right would be to address this problem.

In the end, we have the principle of complimentality which means we should pay attention to the idea of creating a public field fraught balanced which means we have to have private enterprise providing services.  We have to have public services but also have community service.  In many countries, specifically in Latin America, following also the IT recommendation have divided the spectrum three equal parts.  32 percent for private sector.  32 percent for public.  And 34 percent for community.

Between 17 percent for indigenous communities and 17 percent for rural communities, which is first approach to spectrum.  So the idea of having free access means that governments have become absolute in managing spectrum and we have software that can do it much better.

But instead of understanding the whole spectrum as a commance, which is a very different approach, if you are talking about dealing with commercial approach and private and public sector, we want to reserve a small part of spectrum to allow local communities to mobilize their communication.

This would be my few words.  Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.  Very interesting.

Kemly Camacho is next.  Could you introduce yourself briefly.

>> KEMLY CAMACHO:  Of course.

Hello.  Very nice to be here with all of you.  My name is Kemly from Costa Rica.  I reviewed a document, and what I wanted to do is serve up summation to the document based on our experience.

For me, something that I really wanted to strain is that very small line between local content and extractability.  I think we have to pay a lot of attention to that.

I remember one experience in my region, Central America, where a beautiful organization that developed a beautiful process, creating mapping about about communities, identifying with all the community, different places like reverse, spaces, and resources and many other aspects, yes, as a local content creation.

And after that, doing a website or I don't know a technology to present this local content development.  And that was nice.  That was beautiful.  But then some years later we realized the mining company used exactly these mapping, yes, to enter to the community, yes, and it was really a lot of secrets about the community developed in these.

Then I really think we have to be very careful around the relationship between local content development and knowledge extractivists.

Some of the thing that we think is crucial and there is a need to integrate in the document from our side is the relationship between local content and local processes and it is strengthening the local processes and strengthening the conversation of the communities that are going to ‑‑ that are developing these local content.

For us, there is a need to connect things and the process of developing local content have to be really, really in connection with local processes always.  In this sense, we support the locals that are trying to fight for our community right or our community corporate right is something that we are supporting a lot and we think we have to integrate also in our actions the development of community property right.

The other thing I wanted to say is local content is not only indigenous content and it's not only about preserving.  I think it's important to develop local content process and use local content, for instance, for developing communities also, yes, and for different communities in general.

We also work with indigenous women in Costa Rica.  At least for them, they don't like to name reserving to talk about their knowledge.  They prefer to talk about their strengthening.  And this is something that I also wanted to raise in this conversation.

We also work in developing local content with the Central America girls from 12 to 18 years old and in the 6 country in the Central America region, we have developed this process to really create local content with them.

And this local content is produced with them to talk about the main problem they confront.

Then we develop local content for instance about abandon, about the world and the land and climate change, about adolescence pregnancy, about three sides, which is a big issue in our central American region, about the lack of opportunities.  All this process about creating local content and is the development with a research process from the young girls and understand their context.  Then is this idea of developing local content always in relationship with the strengthening of the capacities of the people in the place and the strengthening of the local organization.

This connection between these two are very important for us.  The local content production have to ‑‑ in our case, the develop the understanding of the people who are developing the local content.  In this sense, we have produced ‑‑ in stories of the women, created that the young girls in each of the countries.  For the some recommendation for the document, then the first relate to local content always with the production of localized processes, content and processes all together, and look for community property rights, fight for the community property rights, and strengthening local organization and local processes.  But the production of local content, especially if they are going to be produced with technology or presented with technology.

Thank you very much.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.

Is Francisco here?

Oh, great.  Then it is your turn.  Please introduce yourself.

>> FRANCISCO:  Hello.  Good morning to everyone.  I am Francisco from Paraguay, and I work in the content regulator of telecommunications.  And I want to say that I am not an expert on the issue, but I have some contributions to make.

When in the local community, talk about the marginalization of local languages, and I think that in Paraguay, I think that we have like, I don't know, 20‑plus indigenous languages, but in our constitution, there are only two official.  So we left behind like 20 indigenous language.

I think that Bolivia in that respect did a great job including all the languages spoken by the native and in the local communities in their constitution.

But I think that maybe that brings a lot of challenge and for example when you are a child you cannot learn 20‑plus languages.  That's impossible.  And in the budget, you cannot translate every single document in, I don't know, all the language.  That's impossible.

I think that maybe that cannot be the way, but you cannot make all languages official, that maybe we just have to make a specific content for a specific places on specific people.  And I think that maybe community networks and community radios and community televisions maybe can help make that possible.

And I think that to make that possible there has to be an effective and efficient policy on revelation, like the number talking about the free spectrum.  That could be a way, I don't know, but that ‑‑ that would be received from the ministry of other ministries.

And I think that we should make an effective and efficient revelation and policy.

And in Paraguay, we are in the process of developing a digital agenda, but I think that lacks the policies to ‑‑ for making the local ‑‑ for raising the awareness in local content and the creation of local content.

That's all I have to say.  Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.

Next is Santiago Schuster.

>> SANTIAGO SCHUSTER:  Thank you for the invitation.

My contribution will be from the side of legal aspect and put on value content in the network following what Kemly has said to us.  First, I would like to say that if we use the term content in the broad sense, probably you can include the amount of such figures, signs, et cetera.

But if you put content with Carter, you are talking about intellectual works, like music, audio‑visual, literary works, et cetera.

And then it's important of, when you wish to put on value the culture and content, it is a matter of management of the content.  And my first contribution in this sense is to say that you need to have information to the content.  In the network, in the digital network, if you don't have information about the content, heritage content or content that our creators are producing today, you have nothing.

And in that sense, I think it's important to have some experience from the intellectual property practices.

One of them is to document the works and the study.  To document that, we have received repeatedly refers to the need of documentation of local content for its preservation.

It is a real need that we cannot ignore.  Documenting it does not only mean folding the content.  In internet language, it suggests to add information.

It is interesting to refer to the model used by other societies in Latin American and in the world.  The model is simple, but very useful.  First of all, its creator, person, artist, has a unique code that identify he, her, as a creator, producer, artist.  It was given to ‑‑ this is the IP code.  IPI code.  An identifier of globals K.

We don't have that in the heritage content, for example.  I think it's a need.

Each author who enters into a collective management entity receives this unique code.  We use it throughout that network in collective management environment.

Then each work also receive ‑‑ each musical work receive a universal code also.  It always ‑‑ this is an ISO standard.  This universal code is ISWC code.

And then I think if we need to preserve heritage content or content made by our communities ‑‑ ethnic communities today in Latin America, for example, we need to work in that sense.

The second example is Latin ‑‑ a model of multiterritorial license we discuss the goal to put on value the Latin American repertoire, musical repertoire in the network.  It is a license for licensing repertoire based on a single identity.

Of course in this repertoire we include the ethnic works because it is open to all the works that are created in our region.

Latinal tour ‑‑ in Latinal tour, there are 16 CMOs in 16 countries.  It's a unique model of multiterritorial licensing process in the world, and it's a one‑stop shop that license Spotify, Google play, iTunes, et cetera.

This model have a load of licensing digital uses in Central America also, and it's curious but in Central America we cannot license ‑‑ or the locals competent license to the traditional big users, but they license digital uses.

And I think because the time is gone, I think this is my contribution and I am open to give more information about that.  Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.

Next is Arturro.

>> ARTURRO:  Thank you, but the speech for Francisco is very good from Paraguay.  I prefer other.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Nicko.  Introduction, please.

>> NICKO BIDWELL:  Thank you very much for inviting me.  My name's Nick Bidwell.  I've been working since 2002 with indigenous groups, starting with Australia with aboriginal people, and then when I moved to south Africa, with many people.  Some people who identify as indigenous by UN definitions and some who identify by local definitions.

I'm going to try and change the tack.  This is a bit of a relatively new thing for me to think about.  I've been thinking about content and language for a very, very long time, but our world is different now.  So I'm thinking beyond content is statically created.  I'm thinking about platforms and cultures of reasoning that are embedded into machines and embedded into faces between humans and machines.  So I'm thinking about who does and what does, and I'm going to give two recent examples.

We'll start with one that's perhaps a little more accessible.  I'm very lucky to be working with a people in the Calihari who are some of the oldest living culture that we have there.  Some people know them as groups of the sand.  And I had a group working with a group of people funded by the APC.

And we are looking at platforms like a community network but without the wireless.  We don't have any way to connect to the mobile or connect to wi‑fi.  So working with indigenous programmers from around the world and their allies including in Brazil and a few people around the panel around this table who are also supporting us.  We are using a platform called scuttlebutt which is an offline social network.

And our idea of what we just produced as a prototype is 40 small individuals in the Calihari, sending a message to each other in this secure, encrypted way, just basically carrying a whole of a social network on a simple phone.  And it is importantly encrypted and importantly the means of communication from one individual to another is embedded in their own way of life.

So this is the nitty‑gritty, if you like.  It's not just the what, but it's the how things are communicated.  Maybe it's inappropriate for a man to talk to a woman of a certain blood line.  Maybe it's appropriate for sisters to only talk at certain times of the day or the year.  So there are many ways that we communicate that convey our culture as well.

So that isn't too ‑‑ this is fantastically exciting because indigenous groups are working together to solve their own communication problems with their allies.

The next bit is a little bit more academic, and this is about the algorithms of AI.  So mostly these days the big tech companies new neural networks and they use this kind of reasoning which is deeply embedded with certain very extractive ideas and certain inequalities between large companies.

And you're right.  Somebody said they're trying ‑‑ Google's localizing its tools, so we've got Google AI in Ghana.  But it's universalizing.  It's taking these neural network tools which are based on a particular kind of mathematics and a particular way of extracting, using server ‑‑ energy hungry server farms and certain epstemologies if you don't mind the academic work.

So they make loads of data.  They also ‑‑ these algorithms are weird.  They're racist.  They're gendered.  They come from a certain way of thinking.

But it doesn't have to be that way.  So what we're interested ‑‑ and I have a very small grant with Cambridge university, and we are trying to create programming languages based ‑‑ which are called probabilistic programming languages and these are that local people themselves, maybe they'll speak them; maybe they will write them.  But they are based on their own local concept of likely hood from their own languages.  So the statistics themselves are embedded in local ways of doing statistics, of predicting rainfall, of predicting all sorts of event in the world.

So the important thing about this is it's everyday reasoning, as was mentioned in the recommendations.  It's everyday ways of speaking about the world, and it's local and specific to those people so the big companies cannot get it.  They cannot ‑‑ because it's embedded in the local world.  It's local reasoning.  And also local people can use it using their own language forms.

So where I would like to sort of shift the conversation from and make us aware that we're putting this content out there, but it can be harvested, and not just by people.  By huge machines that are using certain ways of manipulating data.  And we need more in our arsenal that conveys the history of human intellectual endeavor in the very tools and platforms we're building.

>> CARLOS AFONSO:  Thank you.

Bertrand Moullier, if you can introduce yourself, please.

>> BERTRAND MOULLIER:  Good morning.  Thank you, Carlos.

I'm going to talk about perspective of the professional film and television production perspective.  I should start by saying that unusual content is a very broad ecosystem that's the base for everything, amateur content, all the way to the kind of stuff that I'm preoccupied with every day of the week, which is a livelihood and sustainability of the professional video production sectors.

And I would just premise what I'll say, going back to what you said, the summary of the BPF document, that for us, good preservation and conservation of good content, good heritage starts with having buoyancy and sustainability in local production infractures.  So that people can actually make content and make a living out of it.

So we believe suddenly the organization I represent that the internet ‑‑ the boundaries of local and global are pretty porous these days, and that is actually a fact driven by what technology has achieved controversially, of course, but nonetheless and that we we believe in creating a more symbiotic content.

So we're looking for a better understanding between the platform services that we deal with in the internet and web kind of universe.  And the very idiosyncratic risk profile in television ‑‑ and I remind you that every film, to simplify, is a prototype.  You cannot standardize the product like a fridge or automobile.

Because of thi, it demands a bespoke business models of every film and television you're making.  And it's also an exponential good so you can't really tell until it's let out into the public whether it will connect with them and further their imagination.

And finally it has very high production costs.  It was shared with us at the 2016 IGF that the average cost for artisanal production very successfully is around $750,000.  That's for Latin American.  In Europe, it would be around 2.5 million mark.  And if you were in Kenya making an episode for $4,000, that's a lot by the standard of the local sector.  People struggling to close that budget on that.

So we have enormous issues around market failure and difficulty to find sustainable structures to support locally relevant, including stuff made in the local languages.  And we want to create more of a symbiotic relationship with the carriers of our content.  We want them to partner us upstream in the very, very complex and precarious job that content development ‑‑ that works development entails.

Most people, and I was referencing Christina, she spends on average three years developing the new film with her husband so they have to have two or three projects.  During that time, they're not being paid.  So this is an important foundational things to grasp about us.

Secondly, I think there are opportunities in some part of the world for a paradigm jump.  I'm a humble student that's happening to audio visual in Africa.  We have relationships with various country there, which are fruitful and interesting.  We're learning a lot.  And I think it's been started in many places, an absence of what would have been in Europe or elsewhere, the old legacy value chain which made up a theatrical film infrastructure, cinemas for the first film as the first market for broadcast television followed by the video market, et cetera.

That has not occurred in many countries for structural regions.  There was a lack of theatrical infrastructure.  The broadcasters, particularly the public, have been easily under budgeted or over politicized or sometimes both and sometimes have had difficulty in understanding the need to respect for example the basic intellectual property rights of producers of content.

So the video on demand universe present an opportunity in terms of technology and curating and enabling local content.  We think that it's interesting also is talking about the kind of porous boundaries with your local and global.  Four look at the rise of some local video on demand platforms, the business model relied initially on serving the desporic element in Nigerian, and more broadly, African communities based in the United States and the UK, of which of course there are several million.

And from there, they were able to make the business more sustainable and build an offer more local back to Nigeria and other countries that would be priced and localized for the local part.  That's interesting to consider.

The third thing I would say is that the digital switch over which has been much kind of bandied about in the African context.  And in particular there was a big hype about this two or three years ago is the process of more complex and technologically onerous than the slogan suggests.

In theory, once you have unlimited band width, you can then multiplex content into smaller communities.  And the question then arises who's going to pay for that.  You know, in audio visual and in terms of what I said earlier on the cost of manufacturing and other factors, even a language era which is spoken in basically three countries, it's still quite a narrow market to make something sustainable.

And when you come down to minority language, like for example in this part of western Africa, then you get to a dilemma about who is going to cover this and perhaps it needs to be treated as on the same level as social provisions like healthcare and education and then that sort of incentives that come with it become very important.

And the pen ultimate thing I'll say is audio visual strikes me as I get older in this industry is very much like science and the other part of the internet, according to the will of its pioneers, a Utopian structure.  Meaning we just have to cooperate across nations and across cultures sometimes to make our projects see the light of day.

Some of you may have been at the screening with it on Monday night of the mercy of the jungle.  What's striking is that not only was the film made using a lot of cooperative assets in France and Belgium, pre‑acquisitions of rights by certain international challenges but also in developing the script was very close to his bones.  I remind you his father was killed during the Rowandan genocide.

He collaborated online with an American screen writer in New York, and these guys didn't meet until about five years into the collaboration.

The 2005 south African film around the world won many prizes was co‑produced between a British producer, a local distributor and producer, and an American sales agent that took the risk on advancing the balance of the rights.

I could go on like this.  We are very much based on cooperation.  I'll end with this.

I think in order for this Utopia to live on, if you like, we need a certain ‑‑ and I get to the recommendation part to my brief intro ‑‑ we need solid structural incentives which could be in the form of direct subsidy or tax concession, tax credits for example.  We still think this is the most cost effective incentive.  We need a strong copyright framework that applies across the international system so there's kind of legal security when you're trying to exercise an international corporation I described.

And we ‑‑ very essential, not just good handsome copyright laws put the ability for local makers, creators, and producers to access this copyright framework so they can understand how to turn their hard work and effort into tradeable assets that can meet their payroll and enable them to finance the development on the next project.

And I also think we need platforms to understand better the importance of respect for our work, particularly the open platforms to understand that they do share responsibility in preventing the circulation of works that we did not license for their ecosystems and also to pay licensing prices and reflect the value of the content we make.  Thank you very much.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you, Bertrand.

Now it's Valensiya.  Introduce yourself.

>> VALENSIYA DRESVYANNIKOVA:  Thank you, Carlos.

I am Valensiya Dresvyannikova from the International Association for Library Associations.  Thank you very much for the invitation.

So from a library sectors, experiences with local content creation with availability of local content, there are a number of lessons and good practices that are relevant to the questions that this year's report actually poses.

One of the first questions the report highlighted was who participants.  And when we discuss digitization and preservations cultural heritage, especially cultural heritage at risk, there can be significant costs and requirements in terms of expertise.

And as a result one key way forward is to form partnerships between heritage institutions and vulnerable communities, working with them to combine the resources and technical experience of institutions and the knowledge and the priorities indeed of the people.

And through this it's possible to make meaningful preservation choices.  These choices should be based for example on helping communities determine their potential risks that you have mentioned before, what they would want to make public and what should not be made public, given that it's not necessarily possible to preserve everything, decisions need to be taken in that collaborative way.

A good example of such a practice is the listen, hear our voices project carried out by the library archives in Canada.  The goal is to digitize history of languages that are risk of extinction.  The project is guide by an indigenous provider circle and the approach is inherently collaborative.

Archives Canada offers digitalization and training services to indigenous organizations and communities that hold the kind of recordings that contain those languages being spoken and that wish to have them digitized.  They choose together what to preserve and how and the indigenous community members also receive training themselves.

This brings us to a second question the report raises.  For whom?  Who reads or uses what is preserved and made available?  Clearly the first priority is the community itself.  To make the materials usable for them, for example, the project I have mentioned earlier, interesting proven develop tools of access and discovery such as developing independent web portal or a catalog of existing all expressions or crowd sourcing, tagging, and similar tasks.

And to make sure that if the community agrees, heritage materials are available for as many people to enjoy as possible, there are also platforms that can make digitized heritage discoverable and usable for a wider audience whenever appropriate.

In this context, an issue such as online guides and databases, digital finding aides can help and labels for traditional knowledge content can help build a sense of confidence.

Access is also fundamental to another area of heritage digitization where it's currently active and that is digital communication projects.  These are initiatives to digitize and bring together related content that is scattered across different locations.

Such collections can represent shared heritage of more than one community.  So for example due to alliances or Colonial ties.  And digitizing this content makes possible for all parties who may value the heritage to be able to access it online, regardless of distances, so helping researchers or individuals that are simply looking to rediscover their past.

An example of such a project is the France Poland digital library which collaborates with partners in Poland and France to digitize and bring together documents capturing the shared history of France and Poland.

Similarly, under the project, the national library of France cooperates with partners in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Egypt, to digitize their shared heritage.

There are also of course more urgent projects.  The program delivered by the British library supports project that digitize and make available heritage materials around the world that are under various threats from flooding or fire risks to political threats.  We are hoping to see more activities in this area and more support for projects such as these.  And this is just a few examples of libraries leveraging ICT and digitization tools to ensure access to cultural heritage.

Enabling copyright regime and exceptions that facilitate digitalization of culture heritage and access, then they contribute and make unique local content available.  Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you, Valensiya.

Now Alison, please.

>> ALISON RAMER:  Hi, I'm Alison from the Herb Center for the Advancement of Social Media.  We're a human rights organization focused on Palestinian right.

I would say we're quite busy often so we don't have a lot of time to go into the details unfortunately of digitalization and cultural heritage, but definitely these are historic issues for Palestinians.

Palestinians from the past 70 years have suffered from a culturicide, you could say.  This has included physical violence, assassination of key artists and leaders as well as closing of institutions, looting of historic archives, continuation of holding of materials, the Palestinian thumb collection, theater collection, continuing to be held without access.  Many cases like this.

But as today we are focused on how this is translating to the digital space, I will try to also address how we see this online these days.

One of the key things that we have done research on and have talked about is the use of maps to change and to further efforts of removing local language and local history.  This is particularly apparent in the city of Jerusalem which has occupied an an ex‑and their attempts to erase Palestinian culture from the space.

When it come to working with tech companies and ensuring that the maps are not representing a narrative of occupation and Colonialism, we found it's difficult to communicate this issue in a way that leads to effective action, even international law seems to be not enough to convince people that certain spaces or companies that certain space should have a priority of preservation of the Palestinian narrative.

And we see that also in other parts of the world, but particularly in Palestine.

We also see in algorithms and machine learning that historical Arabic language as well as imagery being connected to the lexicon of terrorism, and this can be situations which we've seen where automatic translation has led from one language where the word Palestinian was used to another language where it's been translated directly to terrorist or where the word Palestine has been translated to Syria.  And the lexicon that is connected and being designed around a lot of Arabic revolution language or even simply the names of unrecognized states is supporting efforts of culturicide in the digital space.

Let's see.

We also have of course on a local level within the state of Israel where I think ‑‑ oh, I don't know the exact percentage ‑‑ but, you know, within Israel you have many Palestinian cities in Israel, but there have been efforts to make the illegal to use the name of the Palestinian catastrophe which was the result of the Israeli calling an occupation of the space.  This has been out lawed in textbooks and is one of the words that can be added to the lexicon of things that are illegal to be said.  This includes also support for ‑‑ we have legal changes that make support for the non‑violent movement for boycott of divestment illegal as well.

And efforts by Israel at the European legislative level as well as the U.S. legislative level to expand the definition of anti‑Semitism to include language that is critical of ‑‑ this has resulted in a lot of content take downs as well as legal strategies that are working to shrink both physical and online space for discourse and Palestinian mobilization, which often relies on conversations about the heritage.

Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.

Well, this ends the round of presentations by the speakers, and we open now for an interaction among them.  Anyone wants to ask questions or comments.

You, sir, please.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Thank you, Carlos.  A very good morning.  I am CEO of Bangladesh for radio communication and media information and entertainment.

I would like to share you regarding the technical challenge regarding the local language in the local areas.

We started our battle from couple of years ago regarding creating local content, disseminating local content as well as reserving content, and with the local dialect in Bangladesh.

We found several challenges.  One is top level ‑‑ that is called TLD, language handling.  Second one is LGR.  Third one is the gentleman already speak regarding the old character.

And finally now Bangladesh has enjoyed top level domain up to five or six years.  Second is I would like to say regarding the getting involved with icon, so‑called ‑‑ as a result, including the government of Bangladesh involved in negotiating the rules.  That one also holds battle with the icon.  And now the language on the way to incorporate on top level domain, I am sharing you, this is the main living language in Bangladesh.  Most of the people, 99 percent people, is speaking Bangla?

This is completely missing from the cyber space.  So I would be very happy if our panel, you, negotiate the icon and as early as ‑‑ so that maybe we can have something with the experience from this battle.  Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.

Thiago, I want to take advantage to ask if you can comment on the following.

The people you mentioned you are working with have been cut bay Colonial powers and they are in Peru and Brazil.  When you work with them, do you work with them in Brazil or Peru?

>> THIAGO NOVAES:  Thank you, yes.

They are the most organized group in Latin America.  They are about 100,000 people living in the border between Peru and Brazil.  We work with an organization which represents the whole people.  So, yes, we do work with them in Brazil trying to connect them through the Andes to connect them with Peru using technologies like mesh networks and ability to send photos, for example.

This is a very new technology we are trying to improve with them, and it's very hard to reach internet there, but we are trying to provide them with a satellite connection and also radio, which is very useful for them because of orality.  So there's plenty of spectrum available.

And we are mixing different technologies and also using low cost mobiles to record.  And also we are using scuttlebutt to provide them with systems because they are really under threat.  So having the cryptographer because some have been killed during the last years because they are monitored, their language is under threat, and they are minoring in everything.

And also just to give last input on this, there's a lot of ‑‑ indigenous groups in this area.  So create communication belt in this area means also to protect indigenous groups that do not want any contact with the white because they do not want any contact with the white.

And I would like to have this opportunity to address a few comments on the idea of producing multimedia content.

As I see, illiteracy is a word that is changing completely.  And currently we have more than 200 million strings on the internet, one single app last year was able to enable people to produce a lot of streamings.  And this is pushing the mobile industry to push forward to the dynamic measurement of spectrum which is pushing forward to liberate spectrum.

So there's an explosion of content production, which makes the availability of professionalists and amateur very weak, this difference, which also means that we have to address qualitative interests in licensing process.

So I would like to oppose strongly the idea that copyright will protect these groups in producing their content and to address the idea that maybe license like creative commons or other license that can be created through this ‑‑ by these collective would be important in terms of defending collective interests, we are talking about the right of accessing culture, the right of accessing education.

And the digital world we're living has shown already is that it's not only a matter of incentives.  Copyright is obsolete to deal with the contemporary digital environment.

And I understand difficulties the industry is facing, but it's not because of culture.  It's because of technology.  And if technology is changing, we should really pay attention of the things that technology can bring to our collective living.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.

We have just a bit more than eight minutes.

Okay.  You didn't speak yet.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yes.  So I think we really ‑‑ this morning, we touched upon a number of very delicate policy questions, no?  At least I see two main interests that are partially intentioned on them.

So one is the preservation of local content and keeping it or making it available to the public.  That's one clear interest we heard.

But at the same time also what Kemly was mentioning and also Valensiya referred to the need for safe guarding and protecting collective rights or at least the interests of the communities that are creating those content.

And I would like to share with you with the panel basically the experience that the word intellectual probability organization has in this field where we have governments, NGOs coming over from all over the world for more than 20 years coming to see what to do with the protection of traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.

In fact, we threw a very delicate and complex negotiation, we came across partial solution.  On the one end, we offer technical assistance and training for the communities to be able to digitize and decide what to do with their content.  We have a program with the Mussai, with the Mongolia, with Alaska.

Because the interest of the community is not always to make their content freely accessible online.  It's often a different interest is to preserve it, have it digitized, but then decide who and when and what they can do with it.

So I think ‑‑ and on the policy level, countries of the world were not able to decide on protection.  And we can all agree that copyright perhaps is not the ideal system to protect traditional cultural expressions, I think that's agreed why there's a specific policy discussion how to protect the traditional cultural expression in a specific way.

And regarding licensing.  This is very important.  I believe credit comments is a great solution.  Open source software is a very successful solution in so many fields of the internet ecosystem.  Itself uses largely open source and all the conduct we produce is released under credit comments.  And those exist and contrived only because you have copyright rules.  And this is the way to exercise the right that you get as a creator.  So you create the work and you decide that online it can be shared.  The viral effect of open source, it works only because you have the exclusive rights or you say, look, take my work.  Do what you want.  Translate it.

But if you want to distribute it, if you create derivative work, then you should keep the same licensing condition that is free for all.  Without copyright that impose recreators could not be enforced.  So you run the risk without copyright of having big corporation come into communities, taking their work, and do whatever they want without any legal means to defend their interest.

So I'm not advocating for more.  I'm advocating for more efficient system.  And you are raising a very important point, but it's extremely technical and it's not really black and white.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Okay, thanks.

We have four minutes.  Anyone wants to ‑‑

You have to be very quick because otherwise I'm afraid that everyone will not have a chance.

What I've seen, we've got Nicko, we've got Carlos, and Bertrand wants to respond.  And you will have to be the last speaker.  Anyone else who wants to contribute something, let's see your hand now.

Okay.  There you are.

>> NICHOLAS:  Good morning.  My name is Nicholas.  I really ‑‑ it's interesting that the intellectual property is brought and the industry is expressant.  And I believe that for many years this discussion has been led by the industry, and we have the ‑‑ it's a pity that most of the elder, like the oldest producers of content have been the cultures that have been for centuries and centuries in culture are not that represented here.  They don't have bodies that allow them to be present.

But maybe Carlos, I guess you wanted to share something like that, but we worked together in Mexico with indigenous communities and in many cases what the indigenous communities want is to be left alone, like to be let to what they want to do in their own territory.

So together we think intellectual properties and the law of market, that we have to find this space that is competitive, we also need to put a limit on those so communities are not governed by the loss of market, that are governed in other means can also explore the ways of sharing and growing their culture without us having to impose our rules in their ways of doing things.

So a human rights based approach needs to be highlighted in the BPF as part of the process.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: Thank you.

Carlos now.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Yeah, I really want to say what Nicko said before.  But I think it's important to think about the other ‑‑ another thing that Kemly says, that this is very important, the process in which is contents are creating and how this process engaged the community to another ‑‑ to make another things.  This is very important.

And in our experience, like Nicko says, and other panelists, talk about an experience like that.  Not all the communities want to be connected to the internet and share the content.  A lot of communities want to give access to certain types of content that they selected, and this is important to make how they can achieve that.

But I said in another panel on Monday that it is important to make the technologies adapt to the communities' goals and how the community wants to do that.

So the local content and the experience of local content is a lot of work about that in the history, at least in Latin America.  This is what I know, that it is very important to sustain our process for that.  And this is important to make policies but also to attend how the economics extendibility is not only to make for money.  It is not only money what is important.

It's also important to think how forums in the community can give a sustainability for that.

>> CARLOS AFONSO:  Okay.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  I think internet and broadband internet has done is completely exploded the content ecosystem and mostly with virtuous potentialities, I think.  It means that we have a lot of different stuff now that can travel and engage us in cultural conversations so we think it would be a bet sterile to demonize one set like copyright in favor of other principles.

And we think that people should have the choice to professionalize what they do or not professionalize what they do, and we think, you know, a creditive comments are very interesting, amongst others.  It's a part of a rich system of licensing opportunities which gives a choice for monetize or not monetize.  And that freedom to us is essential.  It would be perhaps insulting to suggest that there is no space for different configurations in what's going on at the moment.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Hi, there.  Just a quick comment.

Something that I found striking is this difference between the preservation or the strengthening of heritage culture, and I think this is something that we should keep on discussing because it's creating very different agencies.

If you talk about preserving something, you're introducing an authority and putting under class a culture somehow.  So we should be aware that we are living in a world that it is about collecting stuff.  I think it's important to see cultures as living expressions and ecosystems, so preserving them is part of a more complex approach, and that should be part of future discussions as well.  Thank you.

>> CARLOS AFONSO:  Okay.  We have to finish.  I would just mention that we have the ‑‑ our outcome document.

>> ONLINE MODERATOR:  Sorry to do this, but we have one remote participant.  She also contributed from the Caribbean.

And her point is that we musn't forget ephemera and the importance of preservation of ephemera as an important component of preserving heritage.  And she mentioned example of an initiative in northern Ireland which is collecting leaflets from the period of the troubles.  I know that in south Africa we have a collection that has material posters and other audio and songs from the struggle against.

So thanks for that.

And then, as Carlos just said, the report is not finished yet.  The IGF gives us ‑‑ and you are all part of this community now, the best practice forum community ‑‑ we have another few days to finish our report.

So please if you are not on the mailing list, you can write to me.  The email address is under the website.

>> CARLOS AFONSO: And you can get onto the mailing list as well.

>> ONLINE MODERATOR:  And you can join the mailing list.  And what I would like you to perhaps say is not just contribute to this year's report but make suggestions for next year and maybe this issue of copyright, maybe that is something that we can investigate in more depth, the disadvantages, what works, what doesn't work, how to create new forms and how to prevent existing forms from being a barrier.

But if you have suggestions of work for next year, particularly work that you can contribute to, then let us know.  We'd like to start the work next year if ‑‑ should we continue working on local content?  So if we're going to continue, we should start early in the year, not late in the year.  So thanks a lot.

>> CARLOS AFONSO:  We count on you.  Okay.  Thank you very much, everyone.

And we're passing around a piece of paper with email addresses just because I suspect you are not all going to sign up to the mailing list.  But please do.  But if you want to leave your email address, and then that way I can follow‑up with you.