[SIGCIS-Members] a few comments regarding copyright

[Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan]

Hi Members,

This is just a brief followup on my research into images & copyright, etc. The short answer is that it's very complicated and hard to find a definitive guide. For images it is especially complicated. In general, academic publishing seems to have a lot of leeway, but there's more grey area than black/white. In the end, my publisher provided the most concrete guidance.

However,  Ben Peters referred me to the guides produced by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. This has some info:
www.cmstudies.org/resource/resmgr/docs/scmsbestpractices4fairuseinp.pdf

MIT Libraries also had some info:
In general:
http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/copyright-information-for-mit-faculty/

For theses:
http://info-libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/copyright-publishing-guide-for-students/reuse-of-figures-images-and-other-content-in-theses/

Debbie Douglas of the MIT museum had this especially robust and helpful account, which in many ways was more concrete than what I found even on the "expert" websites:

There is no single guide because "property rights" are very complicated to untangle.  

1.  There is the permission of the owner of the physical artifact that allows you to examine the "thing", and to make a picture of that "thing."     

Imagine you had donated your bicycle to a museum.  As the owner of the bike, you can control who looks at it, touches it, takes pictures of it.  BUT you do not own the patents, trademarks, copyrights associated with that bike.  You could not grant the right to make a copy of the bicycle.

2.   The second permission is from the maker/creator of the "thing."   Or rather, the owner of the "intellectual" property rights.    In this day, this can very complicated because sometimes the maker licenses other entities to make objects.  The best guide to this is the Library of Congress' website which explains all things copyright (in the US) and the US Patent and Trademark Office which deals with patents and trademarks.  

Hope this helps someone out there.

Best,
Bernard



Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
bernard at u.northwestern.edu

Graduate Fellow, Mediale Historiographien, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Doctoral Candidate, Screen Cultures, Northwestern University

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