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A U.S. copyright protects published and unpublished literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and other works—including the way the creator expresses the work’s contents and ideas. Copyrights grant their owners limited exclusive rights to perform or display works publicly, reproduce and distribute copies, and create derivative works from an original.
Any work created, published, or registered after December 31, 1977, enjoys automatic copyright protection. The protection expires 50 years after the author’s death. All other works created and published or registered before January 1, 1978, and that were still under copyright protection on that date, are copyrighted for 75 years from their creation, publish, or registration date. When U.S. copyrights expire, the work enters the public domain and anyone may use it without permission. However, in some countries, copyrights do not expire.
To register a work in the U.S., send one or more copies of the work with a completed application and $20 U.S. to:
The Copyright Office
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C. 20559
Fair use allows using portions of copyrighted works without permission for such purposes as research, academic teaching and study, news reports, commentary, and other criticism. Four principal criteria determine whether copying falls within the fair use doctrine:
When it comes to digital imaging, many questions are unanswered. For an interesting commentary, see:
In 1994, Donna A. Demac composed a copyright-issues white paper for the Working Group for the Digital Image at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. In this paper, she noted the emerging U.S. legal trend to protect noncommercial rights of artistic work. Recent U.S. laws increasingly protect the integrity of artistic work, the rights of which are never transferrable to customers or heirs. In contrast, European law has long asserted moral rights that affirm creators have inherent, inalienable rights stemming from their creations. These rights cannot be sold and cannot be inherited by heirs. The international Berne copyright treaty explicitly includes moral rights.
The federal U.S. Copyright Act, Section 106A—also known as the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA)—bestows moral rights within the United States. This act focuses on the moral rights of attribution and integrity for works such as paintings, drawings, prints, still photographs, and sculptures created on or after May 31, 1991.
Attribution rights allow artists to assert or disown authorship of a work, and to prevent associating them with a work if it has been subsequently distorted or modified. Integrity rights allow artists to prevent destruction or modification of a work and to receive compensation for destruction when the work enjoys “recognized stature,” variously defined. Whether moral rights apply to digitized art presently remains unanswered.
Increasingly, explicit answers to the perplexing questions of image use are found in the contracts required to obtain images. These contracts usually convey sentiment that images are not image-fragment repositories.
However, since digital imaging is so new, many existing movie and image contracts do not contain digital reuse considerations which address such questions. Consequently most multimedia developers create new content, abandoning all hope of using existing cinematic content rather than negotiate the hundreds of contracts necessary for reuse.
Eventually, common sense, cast into copyright law, will answer such questions without having to consult contracts.
E.R. Beardsley is a former dean of the division of fine arts at the University of California, Riverside, and the founder of the university’s celebrated California Museum of Photography. He has also been a member of the Working Group for the Digital Image at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. In a private correspondence regarding some of the legal questions entangling contemp- orary copyright and trademark infringement issues he aptly notes:
Until there is better understanding, a more common sense approach to its resolution (which means something other than a strictly “legal” resolution), we stand in danger of complete and utter paralysis. No writer will be able to write. No photographer will be able to photograph. Taken to its logical extreme, nothing can be written or depicted that has not already been written or depicted in some form, and therefore subject to copyright or trademark protection.
... The notion of “fair use” is now much in dispute everywhere, largely because it has been left to the lawyers to define its terms. This is not useful, and it has already put obstacles in the path of the flow of information. Even libraries and museums are unsure about what rights they might or might not own to the images and other materials in their collections. Instead of granting permission to use this or that thing, they more often now simply say “use it at your own risk.”
It is difficult to improve upon these succinctly stated views.
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