By Krista Eastman
After the briefest of encounters with legalese, I feel two things: happiness about having never become a lawyer, and gratitude towards anyone who will explain it to me in straightforward terms.
I felt both of those things at the panel “Use with no abuse: How to acquire, borrow, quote and reproduce without copyright infringement.”
Eleanor Lackman, a lawyer at the New York law firm Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, suggested that avoiding copyright infringement is mostly a matter of narrowing your risk. “Litigation is expensive,” she told the audience. “But if you do your best, chances are someone is not going to try to sue the living daylights out of you.”
Catherine Clabby, senior editor at Wilson Digital, Inc., put it another way, “You have to get fussy.”
Lackman clarified both Creative Commons licenses and “fair use” law, limitations placed on the rights granted by copyright. “Creative Commons,” though it’s often assumed to mean free licensing for any kind of use, actually consists of six different licenses, each stipulating different ways in which something can be used.
Lackman described “fair use,” on the other hand, as “very squishy.” Fair use borrowing is intended to “to encourage further discourse, to speak about it, criticize it, do something that doesn’t impinge on their [the author’s] rights but allows you to use it.” And yet determining fair use requires considering these four different factors (or better yet, having a lawyer consider them for you):
- The purposes and character of the use
- The nature of the copyrighted work
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole, and
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
You’ll find a good description of fair use, with examples, here.
Clabby, who shared her experiences securing copyright permissions for a digital book project, also offered ideas for how and where to find good images for publishing projects:
- NASA and other government photos: Government works already belong to you. (And yet even government websites are no free-for-all. Be aware that independent contractors or photographers working for the government may still retain some or all of their rights).
- Non-profits: Clabby suggested requesting permissions from non-profits, many of which have great images and a willingness to share. (Be aware that the non-profit needs to be giving permissions for material for which it actually owns the copyright).
- Flickr: A fantastic source of images. (Be sure you know which Creative Commons license is in play).
- Scientists: Ask researchers for photos. (Remember that photos and cover images published in journals are the copyright of that journal, probably forever).
In closing, moderator Michael E. Newman, senior communications officer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, talked about his surprise at securing rights to use a clip from Star Trek. “If you don’t ask, you won’t get,” he said.
