As organizations that regularly seek funding to support our documentation and archival work, WITNESS and our partners at Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) – have seen how “traditional” funding requirements and guidelines often become significant impediments to our work, despite funders’ best intentions. With this in mind, we drafted an open letter that highlights five key challenges and offers constructive recommendations to center community and care in archives grantmaking.

Join us in adding to this conversation and making funding for community archives more impactful! One of our hopes for this open letter is to spark conversation within community archives across the country on how to advocate for this work. Head over to the Sustainable Future’s blog to read all recommendations. We encourage you to share it and welcome your thoughts.

Explore some of WITNESS’s archiving resources and projects below:

• People’s Database for Police Accountability with Berkeley Copwatch
• Policing the Police with El Grito
• Rohingya Genocide Archive with Rohingya Vision
• Should I Collect and Archive These Videos? tipsheet, co-created with Texas After Violence Project
• Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video

GitHub Rejects Challenge on Tool used to Preserve Videos of Abuses

(New York, November 25, 2020) – A decision by GitHub, a leading software development platform, to reinstate a popular free software tool for downloading videos, means that human rights groups will be able to continue to use the software without interruption to preserve documentation of human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch, Mnemonic, and WITNESS said today. GitHub had removed the code for the software, youtube-dl, from its platform in response to a request by the Recording Industry Association of America Inc (RIAA).

youtube-dl is one of the primary tools used to download videos from hundreds of websites, including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The tool is maintained and updated on GitHub. Videos posted online are essential for human rights investigations and research to expose human rights violations and provide evidence in legal proceedings to hold human rights violators accountable, including in international tribunals.

GitHub did the right thing in reinstating youtube-dl, following a spurious copyright claim, the organizations said. It is a vital tool for preserving and archiving documentation of human rights abuses to preserve evidence that can bring the abusers to justice.

On October 23, the Recording Industry Association of America submitted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request to GitHub to remove all public code repositories of youtube-dl, which essentially constitute the code behind the tool. This request would have left the youtube-dl developers without a key platform to coordinate with other developers working on the open-source tool. These requests are legal notices sent to online service providers that ask them to remove material that allegedly infringes on copyright.

Microsoft-owned GitHub complied with the request a few days later. On November 16, GitHub reversed course and reinstated youtube-dl to its platform, saying that it did so after it “received additional information about the project” that enabled it to reverse its decision.

While there is a possibility that youtube-dl might be used to download copyrighted material like Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off video and other videos mentioned in the request, the Recording Industry Association of America did not provide evidence that this had happened. Instead, it contended that youtube-dl should be removed for use by anyone for any purpose.

During the weeks youtube-dl was removed from GitHub’s platform, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and youtube-dl provided GitHub with information on the legitimate uses of the tool, including “changing playback speeds for accessibility, preserving evidence in the fight for human rights, aiding journalists in fact-checking, and downloading Creative Commons-licensed or public domain videos.”

The code behind youtube-dl is used by dozens of other archival tools and browser plug-ins. Given how important it is across platforms, the attempted removal of youtube-dl from GitHub threatened to do serious damage, the groups said. GitHub is used by the small group of programmers and external contributors behind youtube-dl to help manage the constant updates needed to keep up with the way social media platforms and other websites update their services.

As a recent Human Right Watch report “Video Unavailable” notes, the ability to download, archive, and preserve videos documenting human rights abuses is crucial for human rights work because that potential evidence can be removed by the uploader or by the platform where it was published at any moment, especially as commercial platforms like YouTube prohibit graphic violence on their platforms.

The removal of this tool would seriously hamper a key form of evidence gathering. Social media platforms themselves have acknowledged the problem of losing human rights documentation when they remove content and have encouraged groups to archive videos.

“We use youtube-dl to archive and preserve videos related to human rights violations at the highest resolution available,” said Nicole Martin, associate director of archives and digital systems at Human Rights Watch. “Losing the ability to download and preserve content would be disastrous to efforts to hold abusers accountable.”

The archival and human rights group Mnemonic has used youtube-dl to preserve over two million videos from Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. In its own evaluations it has found a substantial portion of these videos would most likely disappear without the ability to archive them.

“Mnemonic’s most recent review of our archived videos from the Syrian conflict revealed that 23 percent of videos in collections of verified human rights documentation are no longer available on YouTube,” said Dia Kayyali, associate advocacy director at Mnemonic. “Without youtube-dl, that content could have been lost forever.”

People rely on social media platforms as the primary way they access the internet and share information throughout the world. “youtube-dl is essential in the accessible and transparent workflows we employ with our local partners to collect and preserve documentation for human rights advocacy and legal evidence,” said Yvonne Ng, archives program manager at WITNESS.

This free tool enables people to retrieve information and have it accessible offline, especially in low-bandwidth situations or when the internet has been shut down, the groups said.

The Recording Industry Association of America’s request was based on Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known as the “anti-circumvention” rule, which prohibits bypassing, removing, or revealing defects in “technical protection measures” that control not just use but also access to copyrighted works. These protection measures control activities as disparate as who can fix cars and tractors, who can audit the security of medical implants, and who can refill a printer cartridge.

The rule has been applied in ways that hamper public interest archiving by libraries and other institutions, since copyright holders allege that these activities constitute circumventing the technical protection measures to infringe on copyright. The EFF has argued, and GitHub agreed, that its use in the youtube-dl case was a misapplication of the law.

Human Rights Watch contacted the Recording Industry Association of America, GitHub, and youtube-dl for comment. The association did not respond, and youtube-dl declined to comment on the events due to the ongoing legal case. However, youtube-dl did note the importance of GitHub as a platform and explained the origins of its tool. A spokesperson from GitHub said in a November 12 email to Human Rights Watch, prior to the tool’s reinstatement, that “GitHub believes that, as applied to source code, Section 1201 is outdated and too broad, often sweeping up code that has otherwise lawful purposes, but we are nonetheless required to comply with the law.”

The association’s attempt to use Section 1201 this way raises concerns about future efforts to misuse the law to restrict access to the internet’s archival tools that human rights organizations rely on, the organizations said.

GitHub announced new measures to address similar situations in the future. It said it plans to change how it evaluates requests under Section 1201, and to establish and donate US$1 million to a developer defense fund to support open-source developers on GitHub from unwarranted Section 1201 takedown claims. It also said it is advocating changing the copyright law’s anti-circumvention provisions.

This case points to a larger problem of flaws in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the organizations said. The law gives copyright holders very broad powers to impede the use of tools even for legal applications that are in the public interest, like preserving evidence of human rights crimes.

Elsewhere, Human Rights Watch has also warned that abusive takedowns for alleged copyright violations under other Digital Millennium Copyright Act provisions can become a powerful tool for silencing criticism and commentary online.

The provisions in the copyright law are outdated and overbroad, the organizations said. Policymakers need to ensure copyright laws don’t improperly restrict rights or eliminate key sources of evidence to hold rights abusers and war criminals accountable.

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For more on WITNESS’s work on archives, technology, and human rights, please visit:
http://archiving.witness.org/ and https://technology.witness.org/

For more information, please contact:
In New York, for Human Rights Watch, Deborah Brown (English): +1-347-920-8978; or brownd@hrw.org. Twitter: @deblebrown
In New York, for Human Rights Watch, Nicole Martin (English): martinn@hrw.org. Twitter: @av_archivist
In Berlin, for Mnemonic, Dia Kayyali: dia@mnemonic.org. Twitter: @DiaKayyali
In Prague, for WITNESS, Yvonne Ng: yvonne@witness.org. Twitter: @ng_yvonne

The event will feature presentations and discussion on topics such as:

• active open media standardization projects
• seeking consensus in audiovisual preservation strategy
• examination of open media use in film and video digitization
• validation and conformance checking of audiovisual formats
• integration of open source tools into archival workflow
• examples of cross-community collaboration and skill-sharing
• developments in open media

If you can’t make it to the conference, make sure to sign up as a “remote participant” and catch the livestream! You can register for the livestream here and find more details of the conference here.

WITNESS and El Grito de Sunset Park studied over 300 videos from El Grito’s collection of eyewitness videos depicting police misconduct and abuse spanning a dozen years. Sunset Park is a largely Latinx and Asian neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Going beyond headline-grabbing instances of police violence, “Profiling the Police” aims to expose the day-to-day pressure, surveillance and harassment that residents in heavily-policed neighborhoods—most often people of color—like Sunset Park face on a regular basis.  

We set out to address specific challenges that El Grito faced in managing and making use of their collection of media. But we knew that these and other challenges are faced by many police accountability groups around the United States and the world. Additional problems we explored: supporting sustainable, community-led archives and preservation of police abuse accounts;  working towards metadata standards that would make it easier for video collections to be compared datasets in advocacy and reporting.

Lastly, civil rights law in New York and other states make it extremely difficult to access police officer personnel records for reports of misconduct or disciplinary action. While the burden of exposing abuse should not disproportionally rest on communities directly affected by it, collections like those held by El Grito are an important part of bringing greater transparency around misconduct. 

“Profiling the Police” would not have been possible without the support of our advisors which include:

• Benetech
• Berkeley Copwatch
• Digital Verification Corps.
• Dignity and Power Now!
• El Grito de Sunset Park
• Engine Room
• Human Rights Analysis Group (HRDAG)
• HURIDOCS
• Interference Archive
• Invisible Institute
• Karen Stevenson, Metropolitan Interactive
• Legal Aid Society
• Lucy Parsons Labs
• Open Police Complaints
• Robin Koning, Archivist
• Robin Margolis, Audiovisual Archivist
• Security Force Monitor
• Syrian Archive

For more on the project, click here.

WITNESS’ Brazil Program Manager Victor Ribeiro joined a panel at the National Archives to discuss the importance of archiving and community strategies regarding Brazil’s favelas where black youth are especially targeted, surveilled and murdered by police. Our Brazil team continues to train, organize, and help preserve critical footage of police violence and community-led narratives by bolstering the work of partners like Coletivo Papo Reto. 

Thanks to the efforts of all translators and volunteers reviewers in Brazil, with special shout-outs to Maria Byington and Marco Dreer, whose translations and revisions have resulted in the final guide which has been circulating around the country in events and discussions on the use of video in the fight for social justice.

Read the original post in Portuguese. 

In 2017 especially—from the villainization of the Rohingya fueling a genocide, to the epidemic of violence and video used as entertainment against the transgender community—activists are fighting false narratives on the daily. And when there is footage supporting this fight that authorities want to destroy, archiving is crucial.

Screenshot from WITNESS Media Lab case study on police violence and accountability.

This is epitomized in the case of Kianga Mwamba, who retrieved her eyewitness video documenting police abuse from the cloud after officers had deleted it from her phone. Knowing how and when to store footage and then retrieve it can alter the course of a case of abuse, from getting the truth out against an official narrative to the difference between an innocent or guilty judicial verdict. 

So join us in celebrating this month and bolstering the work of courageous activists by learning to protect human rights footage. Our Activists’ Guide to Archiving is available online and for download in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese. From creation, to organization and storage, the guide takes readers through step-by-step processes used in archiving workflows. 

As always, we welcome feedback, remixing, and sharing of our resources. Together, we can make sure that powerful stories and evidence are not erased, forgotten, or denied.

On January 25th, Yvonne will participate in a one-hour guest talk with the Winter School for Audiovisual Archiving hosted by The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Yvonne will discuss the preservation strategies that WITNESS has implemented for its 25-year archive of human rights video.

The webinar will be livestreamed and registration is free. For more details and to register visit: http://bit.ly/2jp3879.

On February 8th, Yvonne will participate in the Council on Library and Information Services, Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections (SAHC) Webinar: “Overcoming Project Hurdles: Approaches to Identifying and Managing Collection Red Flags”, where she will discuss challenges she faces in caring for her collection and evaluating and managing ethical issues.

Registration is currently full for this webinar however, you can listen to the recordings of the session, which will be made available a few days after, by visiting: http://bit.ly/2jS1dLv.

The new video provides a brief overview on the importance of archiving in order to prevent your video evidence from potentially being lost or destroyed in the event that your account gets hacked, your hard drive dies, or your video is seized. Archive! and the Archive Guide show you what steps to take to preserve important video evidence that can help expose human rights abuses and support calls for justice. 

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Yvonne Ng is the senior archivist at WITNESS, an international nonprofit organization that supports individuals using video to document human rights abuses. She manages the organization’s video collection, which is recorded by partners and staff, and creates training resources to empower activists to archive and preserve their own videos. In 2014, WITNESS received SAA’s Preservation Publication Award for Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video. Read on as Ng shares how she feels archives can promote and protect human rights.

SAA: What drew you to the archives profession?

YN: I have always had an interest in independent and alternative media. In 2005, I worked at the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre in Toronto, one of the oldest artist-run centres in Canada, to assess its film print collection. While it was a circulating collection, many of the prints were unique or best copies of important Canadian experimental works. At the time, I had a background in film studies and was just learning film preservation on the job.

I ended up at the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program at NYU, where I became more acutely aware of the problems of magnetic media and the emerging challenges of digital video. In MIAP, we were taught principles and standards, but also exposed to the realities of both large, slow-moving institutions and small, underresourced nonprofits. My interest was in de facto archives, places where media was being made or collected that did not necessarily have the mission or resources to archive and preserve. This culminated in my thesis, which focused on assessing the readiness of small organizations to start their own archival initiatives.

I think what draws me to the archives profession is actually the need for archival expertise and skills outside of formal archival institutions. It’s here that I feel I can make the most impact.

SAA: What groups have you partnered with to document human rights abuses and advocate for change?

YN: WITNESS has worked with more than 360 organizations over our 23-year history. We have partnered with international human rights organizations like Amnesty International, and national human rights groups like LICADHO, which fights forced evictions and land grabs in Cambodia. We have worked with lawyer-led groups like the Research and Advocacy Unit in Zimbabwe and Our Children’s Trust, which tackles climate change in the United States. We also partner with independent activist media collectives and citizen witness groups documenting systematic abuses in places like Syria and Brazil.

SAA: What role can archives play in protecting and promoting human rights?

YN: We all know on the most basic level that archives and archival records are useful for securing rights and proving abuse. But outside of formal archives, good archival practices also can be advantageously employed by people who are monitoring and documenting human rights in their communities.

Videos by citizen witnesses and activists may contain valuable information and evidence but are particularly vulnerable to loss, tampering, or decontextualization. There are greater security concerns for the individuals and for the footage. People are using available cameras or mobile phones with sometimes unsustainable formats, storing on consumer-grade portable hard drives, or uploading to third-party video sharing sites. Also, activists who film usually do not have time to properly arrange or describe their content, and the more they record, the harder it becomes to find and identify particular videos.

Archivists can support activists who are protecting and promoting human rights by sharing knowledge about basic practices that can help ensure that authentic evidentiary content is properly protected, preserved, and accessible later on.

SAA: What’s one thing you wish everyone knew about archives?

YN: I would want everyone to know that archiving should not just take place in archives, but is an essential component of present-day digital production workflows. Digital video can become inaccessible immediately, not just far off in the future, if it is not properly handled, managed, and described from the outset.

SAA: As an archivist, I can ___________________.

YN: . . . help people make the best use of their media to create change in the world.

This was the message shared by WITNESS archivist Yvonne Ng along with archivists Rachel Mattson and Marie Lascu at their recent training for activists on how to archive their video collections.

Hosted by Interference Archive, an archive for activist materials in Brooklyn, New York, the training brought together activists and archivists to discuss the core principles and practices of archiving. Using their own collections as examples, participants were led through modules on the basics of video and metadata, organizing and storing media, and accessibility and long-term storage considerations. Through activities, group work and the presentation of a video from WITNESS’s series on archiving video, participants worked together to figure out the best methods for organizing and preserving various collections.

Through implementing these steps, the trainees will be able to preserve media captured of protests, arrests, testimonies and other subjects and allow them to share these videos later for advocacy, justice and accountability and educational purposes.

To learn more about archiving video, check out The Activist’s Guide to Archiving Video and accompanying video series (currently in progress).