[SIGCIS-Members] a few comments regarding copyright

[James Sumner]

Thanks for sharing these with the list, Bernard.

It's worth emphasising that the "fair use" concept, as focused on by the 
three sources linked below, is very specific to the United States. 
Britain, Canada and other Commonwealth countries have various different 
sets of provisions known as "fair dealing", which tend to be similar to 
US "fair use" but not as lenient.

Best
James

On 28/02/2011 18:38, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan wrote:
> 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/
> <http://www.cmstudies.org/resource/resmgr/docs/>*scms*bestpractices4*fairuse*inp.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 <mailto:bernard at u.northwestern.edu>
>
> Graduate Fellow, Mediale Historiographien, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
> Doctoral Candidate, Screen Cultures, Northwestern University
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members