Ethical issues in legacy language resources

Recently, there has been extensive work in linguistics to develop recommendations for digitizing legacy language materials. However, relatively little work has been done on the social and legal concerns regarding rights and access to these materials, most of which were created when concerns surrounding intellectual property were less sensitive than they are today. We discuss four issues related to establishing rights and access to legacy language materials: (i) determining what “community” they should be associated with, (ii) establishing rights retroactively, (iii) establishing rights and access to “orphan” works, and (iv) assessing the sensitivities associated with different genres.