CAA News Today
CAA’s Fair-Use Specialists Answer Your Questions
posted by Patricia Aufderheide — March 14, 2016
Patricia Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication and director of its Center for Media & Social Impact, School of Communication, American University; and Peter Jaszi is a professor at the Washington College of Law, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University.
Since CAA’s Code of Best Practices was released in February 2015, we have met with many groups and individuals in the visual arts, and we have witnessed major policy changes taking place across the visual arts field as a result of the Code.
Recently, two major organizations announced an easing of copyright restrictions that will make publishing about art infinitely easier. In late February, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation announced new guidelines for fair use that will “make images of Rauschenberg’s artwork more accessible to museums, scholars, artists, and the public.” In its press release, the foundation cites the prohibitive costs associated with rights and licensing, as well as the obstacles copyright restrictions create in converting print publications to online formats. http://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/newsfeed/foundation-announces-pioneering-fair-use-image-policy.
Also in the past few weeks, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) announced that it is revoking its guidelines on thumbnail images in online publications, which restricted the fair use of works of art to small-scale reproductions with low resolutions. Furthermore, it encouraged its members to rely on CAA’s Code of Best Practices until such time that they prepare new policies of their own. Additional important changes have taken place at Yale University Press, where they now support reliance on fair use in scholarly catalogues, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which relied on CAA’s Code when designing the online catalogue of its collection. Other museums are following suit, as are visual artists.
As we look back on one year living with and promoting the Code, we wanted to pull together some of the most common questions we received, with answers! (You will also find these questions added to the FAQs on CAA’s website.) We have been consistently amazed, but not surprised, by the interest, curiosity, and the sheer will the visual arts field has employed in applying fair use.
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Is fair use only applicable to non-commercial uses?
Fair use is applicable whether the use is commercial or non-commercial. That fact is very well established in law. Recently, the appeals court decision supporting Google Books’ use of copyrighted books as fair use explicitly says, “Google’s profit motivation does not in these circumstances [that is, Google’s transformative use of the information] justify denial of fair use.” The same would be true when an otherwise qualifying fair use occurred in the setting of a print publication offered for sale.
This is not a new or novel proposition. In fact, for the last 175 years, almost all of the creators who successfully asserted fair use have been engaged in commerce, in a big or small way. That’s because, under the prevailing definition copyright law, most things that we do in our professional lives (write, make art, publish books) are “commercial.” If money will or may change hands, that’s enough – even if the transaction is done without the expectation of profit. So treating commerciality as a knock-out factor would be the death knell of a meaningful fair use doctrine.
It is true that the non-commercial character of a use may be one feature that can add to a fair use claim. But it is not a particularly important one. Likewise, the size of the print run generally is not a relevant consideration in assessing the validity of fair use. The key to fair use is making sure your use is “transformative,” that is, using the material for a different purpose than the market purpose.
There’s more about this at pages 15-16 of the Code.
Is the Code only applicable to the so-called fine arts? What about artists working in design or photography?
The Code is carefully crafted to provide a reasoning framework in five common situations in the visual arts: analytic writing, teaching, making art, museum work, and archive/collections digital display. Any artist, teacher, writer, or curator can apply the Code’s fair use reasoning if they are engaged in one (or several) of these activities. So can students in the field, and so can independent visual arts professionals, and even amateurs. Many of the activities that graphic designers and photographers engage in give rise to the same copyright questions that confront other visual arts professionals. Sometimes, however, their work may involve other issues—trademark questions, for example, contractual disputes, that fall outside the scope of the Code. The important point is that fair use is for everyone, not just for a privileged few.
What if rights holders or brokers such as ARS and VAGA don’t accept my fair use claim?
In the first instance, of course, what is (or isn’t) fair use is for the user to decide. Rights holders and their agents don’t have the last word (or any word) on this determination. And, at least so far, they haven’t chosen to make a case of any situation in which a user proceeded without license. If your uses are made within the terms of the Code, and you are able to explain how that is true, you have such a solid argument for fair use that rights holders will be in deep peril of wasting their money and time by bringing any legal action. That doesn’t mean that “nastygrams”—letters demanding payment or expressing outrage and issuing threats of legal action—couldn’t be sent. People are free to write whatever they want in letters, even if it is not true.
You may decide, of course, not to employ fair use if you think rights holders may see it as an unfriendly act, and decide not to like you any more. Personal relationships matter in any field.
But if a rights holder threatens action in an unrelated area—for instance, threatening to withhold access to an artist for a later project, or to raise fees for an unrelated work to cover the lost license—you might want to document it. This might be an illegal act on their part.
How big can images get under fair use on a website? We used to have the pixel sizes that AAMD prescribed, but they have retired those, and currently refer us to the Code. But the Code has no specifics on that.
The Code offers no specific recommendations on image size for any purpose, and that is a deliberate choice. The heart of fair use is repurposing material and using what is appropriate for that new purpose. Therefore, individual visual arts professionals need to ask themselves what size is appropriate for any image used to accomplish their objectives. The question always is the same: what amount is (or what reproduction quality) is reasonable. And the answer to this question will always vary according to circumstance. The requirements of a scholarly monograph, for example, may be different from those of a local art blog. No one wants a document that provides a reasoning framework across fields to offer numerical prescriptions. That would not only be hazardous legally (uses have to be appropriate to the specific transformative purpose), but would run the risk of being sadly and quickly outdated, given the fast pace of digital change.
The decision of the AAMD to withdraw its 2011 recommendations on the size of “thumbnails” is an illustration of this fact. Only a few years ago, this was a pioneering document, but as visual arts professionals have become more familiar with fair use, and both practices and expectations around the use of images to support discourse (especially on-line) changed, what had once offered freedom came quickly to feel like a straitjacket.
Of course, institutions may still choose to adopt rules of thumb on image size for internal use, to simplify day-to-day decision-making. But these always should yield to case-by-case consideration when they stand in the way of completing worthwhile projects.
I don’t understand how to employ fair use when I have to get an image from a museum or archive. Often, they will want to charge me a fee just to obtain that reproduction.
Yes, if you need someone’s permission to get access to material you need, you can’t rely on fair use to get it. As a practical matter, fair use only can be employed by someone who already has independent access to the same or similar documentation. The flip side of this proposition, of course, is that if you can find appropriate documentation from another source, you don’t have to pay reproduction or access fees to the collection that holds the original. Reproduction and access fees are common; many collections still use them to cover the costs of serving you. Sometimes people confuse these with copyright licenses, but it should be clear in the contract what exactly you’re paying for. Increasingly, public museums are posting images, particularly of works in the public domain, to digital platforms. Their goal is to increase public access and limit the amount of work their own staffs have to do.
Fair Use in the Visual Arts: Detroit Happenings
posted by Patricia Aufderheide — May 06, 2015
The visual arts community is already putting the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts to work in Detroit. At a late-April meeting at the Cranbrook Art Museum, speakers showed fair use can enable work in five areas.
After a presentation on the Code by Janet Landay of the College Art Association and myself, a panel of experts explained why fair use matters to them:
Publishing. At Wayne State University Press, explained its director Jane Hoehner, fair use is essential to publishing work on film studies, one of the press’ major lines. Until now, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies code of best practices in fair use has been useful, but this new code opens more opportunities. The press does not depend on fair use for covers of the books, which function more like advertisements and are much harder to justify as a transformative use because of that.
Teaching. Diana Y. Ng, who teaches art history at University of Michigan-Dearborn, was pleased to see that current practice in her department agrees generally with the field’s consensus on using teaching materials. Fairly-used materials are, among other things, limited both to a particular course and to the students, teachers and staff in that course, and images are used at an appropriate resolution for teaching.
Art. Mark Newport, Artist-in-Residence and Head of the fiber department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, recalled an earlier project in which he created an artwork incorporating a DC Comics character. His rationale for doing so fell squarely within the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. But when DC Comics sent a letter asking him if he would like to license the work, he found himself having to take sole responsibility for his copyright choice. He hopes that the Code would provide guidance for institutions on what level of risk is involved in a fair use decision, since working within a field consensus generally significantly lowers the risk. “As an artist, I think you should use your fair use rights,” he said, “and be a problem for anyone who believes you should not.”
Collections. At the Henry Ford Museum, Nardina Mein, who manages the archives and library at the Benson Ford Research Center there, a number of policies encourage access to archival materials. Her museum provides digital access to some collections, and “the Code will help us tremendously with this work, especially in cases where we cannot find the copyright holders.”
Museums. Terry Segal, a registrar for the Detroit Institute of Arts, sees fair use as a way of expanding access and also streamlining work. She took heart from the simplicity of CAA’s fair use code. As someone who has spent a lot of time granting and getting permissions, she found the fact that fair use is so simple to execute heartening. “When we’re using fair use, we don’t have to worry about what all the rights in the piece are,” she noted.
Librarians, museum staff, scholars, artists, and teachers at the event seized upon copies of the Code to share with their colleagues. We look forward to stories of how the Code was received and used; stay in touch at nyoffice@colleageart.org.
Fair Use in the Visual Arts: The News Spreads
posted by Patricia Aufderheide — May 06, 2015
Since the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts launched in February, it has begun conversations in libraries, museums, archives, editorial offices, and classrooms. (Need a refresher on that code? Check out this video!) Now, it’s picking up fans.
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) have just endorsed the Code and other organizations have also expressed their enthusiasm. The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) sent a letter of support to CAA in February, as has the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), which also posted it on their resource page.
The Code’s facilitators have been busy with workshops and presentations at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Art Libraries Society of America annual conference in Dallas, a meeting of the Legal Issues in Museum Administration in Washington, D.C., the University of Chicago and Western Illinois University among others. The College Art Association has also sponsored several webinars, including a five-part series that continues into May.
If you’re interested in hosting an event on fair use in the visual arts, contact nyoffice@collegeart.org.