Re: Digitizing art slides?

From: Dan L Burk <BURKDANL[_at_]shu.edu>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 08:51:36 -0400

On 4/22/99, Carline Haga <carline.haga[_at_]thomson.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/21/99, Dick Perrin <perrinr[_at_]lib01.ferris.edu> wrote:
> >
> > We have a faculty member who wants to digitize the art slides that
> > he has been showing in his class for several years. After they have
> > been digitized, he want to mount the images on his WebCT site for
> > his students to access in their studies.
> >
> > What procedures must he follow to comply with current copyright
> > laws. He feels that this is a fair use of course.
>
> This is pretty basic. Who owns copyright to the slides? Permission
> must be obtained from the copyright holder to distribute the slides
> for his class on the Web (all the conditions being given in the
> request for permission -- such as password-protected site, length of
> time shown on the Web, etc.)
>
> If these rights were cleared when he began using the slides in class,
> the faculty member would not have to clear them again, however.

It's not clear to me that this is basic at all, as Tyler Ochoa's reply in this thread points out. Assuming that there is a valid copyright in the slides -- which, if they are public domain works, there may not be -- there is probably no reason for the teacher to have obtained permission for his current use of the slides in class, since section 110 and/or fair use principles allow display of the slides in face-to-face instruction without obtaining permission.

The question is whether placing the slides on the web now implicates rights not implicated in the classroom setting. It's not at all clear that slides on the web are being "distributed," although they are likely being reproduced, and possibly publicly displayed. The use of password protection or other technical restrictions might, as Llew Gibbons suggested, modulate whether the display is "public" under the statute.

Certainly the section 110 exemption will not apply in the same way, since the instruction is no longer face-to-face. Transmission is permitted to another classroom, or to physically disabled students, but the question does not indicate that these narrow situations will apply.

This is, in short, an extremely complex question -- although an increasingly common one -- which cannot really be answered without considerably more information about the nature of the slides, nature of the class, and nature of the use.

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Dan L. Burk
Seton Hall University
burkdanl[_at_]shu.edu

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Received on Fri Apr 23 1999 - 12:56:27 GMT