On a pragmatic level there is another consideration. Due to 1970s copyright changes and subsequent retroactive extensions those of us working on the mid-20th century would often like to reproduce images such as advertisements. Most advertisements were not copyrighted when they first appeared, but received protection in the 1970s when fundamental changes were made to the system. In this case ownership lies with the company that placed the advertisement, not with the publication where it was placed. In many cases it is impossible to track down eventual owner of the intellectual property assets of a long-defunct business. Furthermore it's not uncommon for the current owner never to have heard of the company in question (a failed company is acquired by another company, which then fails and is acquired, by a firm that merges, etc.) Most publishers will accept evidence of a good faith effort to try to track down the copyright holder and receive permission to use the image in lieu of a signed permission form. Some will not, meaning that there is no way to use the image in question. The moral: start a long time ahead with the image permissions and find out in advance what the policy of your publisher is. No company is ever actually going to sue you for reproducing an image of a 1920s bookkeeping machine or a 1970s video terminal in a scholarly publication, so what matters is not the actual law but the opinion of the law held by your publisher's legal department. (As long as you're not calling them Nazi collaborators, I suppose, in which case probably best to have all the permissions signed first). Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of James Sumner Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 3:44 PM To: members@sigcis.org Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] a few comments regarding copyright 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-guid e-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@u.northwestern.edu <mailto:bernard@u.northwestern.edu>

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

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