Need Sounding Board for Copyright/IP Questions « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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Need Sounding Board for Copyright/IP Questions

(6 posts) (5 voices)

Asked 4 years ago by rebeccaonion
Latest answer from rebeccaonion

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rebeccaonion
Member
Hi everyone,

I'm working on an Omeka project with a class, and am concerned about the kinds of images we might be able to include with our item records. The class is about popular culture and childhood, and the students are nominating for inclusion (& writing item records about) objects that were significant to their own experiences with pop cult as kids; this results in an archive full of items like Jersey Shore and Harry Potter which are very much still in copyright.

I know this isn't the right forum for specific questions about copyright, but is there someplace I could turn to get some feedback about this project? I've often wondered whether there might be some entity out there that would offer pro bono advice to people working in education who are worried about committing inadvertent copyright violations.

Thanks.
Rebecca
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Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Patrick Murray-John

Hi,

The Center for Social Media has a couple different Fair Use guides, including one tailored to Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video that might be helpful.

Bound By Law from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain is also great reading on the topic, but is aimed more toward documentary producers.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Micah Vandegrift
Member

Here's another one from the Copyright Clearance Center. This seems like a great opportunity to teach the students about copyrights in an educational setting and fair use. Also, depending how deep you want to go down this rabbit hole, you could introduce them to Creative Commons; here's 30+ places to find CC licensed media>. Also, I'm assuming the students are probably using Google Images to dig up their results - you can filter search results by images with CC Licenses - Google outlines it here. (*hoping I did my HTML right)

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
unsworth
Member

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) has a great collection of resources on this subject:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

So does the library at the University of Maryland, more specifically aimed at instructors:

http://www.umuc.edu/library/libhow/copyright.cfm

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
Dorothea Salo
Member

Rebecca, you might try asking either your campus legal office (I've dealt with campus legal at two-three different institutions, and they've always been fantastic) or at your campus library (which may have a copyright expert internally).

Is the Omeka project live on the web, or on a private server? The answer may impact the strength of a fair-use analysis. (IANAL, TINLA.)

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
rebeccaonion
Member

Hey, thanks, everybody (especially Patrick, who is now officially the fairy godfather for this project, having also helped me on the technical side over at Omeka). I will dig through all of this.

The question of how far down the copyright rabbit hole to take the students in a good one. I was planning on selecting their images myself this semester, given that we're already spending a lot of time in my class on "extra" instruction that's not teaching them the content on the syllabus. (I taught them Zotero, made them use databases for their research, and am requiring them to write these weird-to-them archive entries instead of traditional papers, which is already a tall order for some of them - there are a lot of freshmen in the class - as well as a tall order for me, as an early-career instructor.) I might make this part of the assignment next semester, however.

I may also include on the site a written statement that summarizes my rationale for claiming fair use for the images that I use (I mean, if I pick any that are questionable, which seems inevitable). I'm not sure how much protection that will provide, but I thought I'd seen something similar elsewhere. If anybody has good examples of this, or feedback re: whether this is a good idea, I'd love to hear it.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink

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