AIDS museum project thinks about copyright

I’ve just been to a very interesting seminar organised by the Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU) and the South African History Archive (SAHA) to discuss the potential structure of an AIDS Museum and multi-media project in South Africa.

I suggested that using Creative Commons licenses for the archive’s content would be a good idea if the idea is to enhance the public nature of the archive and encourage greater interactivity among participants. But there are some serious questions around potential unexpected uses that may require the license being adapted.

Take this example. A person living with HIV/AIDS decides to donate their story to the museum because they feel that this would be a good contribution to the public’s knowledge of the disease. The museum uses the terms of a Creative Commons non-commercial license. But ‘non-commercial use’ may not be specific enough in such sensitive cases. Say someone found the pictures and decided to use them in a degrading music video, without understanding the reasons why the information is being made available.

Perhaps we need to provide more options that make ‘non-commercial purposes’ more specific. One idea could be to specify that information may only be re-used, copied and distributed if it is for the purpose of raising awareness around the many facets of HIV/AIDS. And that information needs to be presented in a way that ‘does no harm’ to the people involved.

What do you think?