ASSIGNMENT THREE
Easy Access vs Fair Use
Before an image is converted to digital form, the right to reproduce it electronically for user display must be acquired, or the public-domain status of the work must be verified. (Simple possession of a work or a reproduction does not necessarily give its owner electronic reproduction or distribution rights.) The conditions under which users may view, print, or download each image must be determined and a system built that enforces those rules.
Besser and Trant, Introduction to Imaging, Getty Art History information Program, 1995, p. 17.
Our Problem
How do we combine our desire to disseminate the Hulmer art works broadly with our need to protect our property and ownership rights? There is no simple answer to this question, for it depends upon how we define the role of this website, its relationships to us its creators, and its function as part of Allegheny College, the owners of the artwork and patron of the project. In this exercise we will consider legal and professional policies on ownership and publication, security possibilities, and common practice concerning fair use. We will use the OCD application to carry out our discussions and expand our frames of reference. Some questions to consider are listed below. What are the issues?
What exactly are we trying to protect? Why do we have copyright laws?
- A wonderful all-purpose site is The Copyright Website . The Web Issues page speaks directly to people creating websites, like us. Look at the Implied Public Access section of this page.
- Many of these sites include copies of the laws themselves. Among others, examine the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia prepared by the Educational Multimedia Fair Use Guidelines Development Committee in 1996.
- Christine Sundt's page Copyright and Art Issues is useful since it addresses directly the problems of fair use in the art history classroom.
- The Getty Trust maintains numerous facilities dedicated to promoting good policy and practice on these public art issues. Besser and Trant's book, cited above, contains pertinent information that you should read, particularly their sections on Access and Security Policy and Procedures.
- One interesting group that promotes very free use of material is the Electronic Frontier Foundation For example, in one article archived by the EFF, author David Johnson asks Is Intellectual Property the Answer or the Problem? and suggests that copyright laws should be weakened in order to promote creative growth.
What have others done?
Look at some of these museum and art sites for examples of how people handle this issue differently. Set yourself the task of trying to look at their images as closely as possible AND trying to download the images into your account for your own use. I've given you home page references, but you may have to wander into the sites a bit to get to the images themselves. For many museums, having to work for the images is part of the strategy. Ask yourself if their methods are legal? are they user-friendly? and are they role-models for us?
This image of Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation was downloaded from the Uffizi site listed above. Am I using it legally on this page?
- Do we have the electronic reproduction and distribution rights to the Hulmer Russian Art collection? How do we check this?
- How do other entities try to control unauthorized use? Do these methods work? Consider the example sites posted.
- What technologies are available for marking our images and / or controlling access to them? Do we personally have these capabilities?
- What do you think would happen if we just put our images out there on the web and didn't worry about what happened to them? Which, if any, of the usage scenarios do you think we should try to prevent?
- Are we the people who should be making these decisions? If not us, then who?
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This page was last updated on February 3, 1997.
The graphic design concept comes from David Siegel (see Credits) and the animated graphic from Gavin Studios cited above.