Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper discusses questions of law, ethics, questions of ownership, and practices of digital restitution of historical voice recordings from the Berlin Lautarchiv.

Paper long abstract:

Currently, the Berlin Lautarchiv at the Humboldt University holds hundreds of historical voice recordings that were produced with prisoners of World War I in German camps (1915-1918). Despite the fact that no documents of consent by these speakers exist, the archive is in the position of having the legal rights to administer the recordings and grant access to for their use. This also means that even relatives of these speakers have to ask for permission for using these acoustic recordings and their documentation and sign a user agreement.

Ethically, this situation begs the question of who owns, or, in this case, inherits the human voice that was recorded in a project of colonial knowledge production?

Our paper speaks to a project of digital “restitution”, initiated by Anette Hoffmann, Fatou Cissé Kane and Christopher Lee, which aims to hand over the historical recordings with African speakers to the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. On the basis of our research on voice recordings, we discuss legal and ethical issues, around the ownership, colonial production, and current geographical location of these historical sound documents. This entails legal gaps and ethical issues which arise in the process of making accessible the sound documents in a process of “digital restitution“, which seeks to grant free access to the documents in institutions of the speaker’s country of origin.