Question for legal types, RE image copyright

[Bahimiron]

This is a question from my ex who, after a goddam nightmare of a process to get her thesis proposal approved, is finally ready to start writing. A lot of the evidence in favor of her idea comes in the form of pictures of art, so she has this question.

When writing an academic paper that needs to use images for reference, what is the protocol if the best images you can find are on google? Do you need to cite the website? Do you need to ask the website owner for permission? If they don't have a watermark or a little copyright thing, are they up there for fair use?
If no one is going to actually read the paper except for a couple of professors, do you need to cite it at all? or just be like 'hey. Here's a picture. You can assume I took it'

Most of the pictures she has are taken either from dig sites or from museums (her degree is in pre-Classical Greek archaeology) which are in most cases tourist photos, and in some official photos of the exhibit taken by the museum to post on their website.

I offered to post this here cos I knew that this board had some great legal minds and also Flower, so it couldn't hurt to give it a shot. Any help would be appreciated!

[Troy S Goodfellow]

This is less a legal issue than an academic ethics one. Scholarly use and commentary is a fair use exception to copyright (though not bulletproof), so the legal matters are likely negligible provided she is not copying an entire catalog of artifacts.

The fuller the documentation the better so the reviewers can refer to the original source and not rely on whatever documentation she choose to provide.

Always cite the source of the photo, and use official photos whenever possible. If this is a PhD thesis, I doubt that tourist photos would pass muster as evidence because of lighting, angle, detail and the like. Museums generally keep descriptions and full photos on file because the context is important, especially for images.

(No one really cares about MA theses, but always err on the side of documentation.)

Troy

[Kael]

From: 10 Big Myths about copyright explained (http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html)


See EFF notes on fair use and links from it for a detailed answer, but bear the following in mind:

The "fair use" exemption to (U.S.) copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's vital so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to appropriate other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. Are you reproducing an article from the New York Times because you needed to in order to criticise the quality of the New York Times, or because you couldn't find time to write your own story, or didn't want your readers to have to register at the New York Times web site? The first is probably fair use, the others probably aren't.

Fair use is generally a short excerpt and almost always attributed. (One should not use much more of the work than is needed to make the commentary.) It should not harm the commercial value of the work -- in the sense of people no longer needing to buy it (which is another reason why reproduction of the entire work is a problem.) Famously, copying just 300 words from Gerald Ford's 200,000 word memoir for a magazine article was ruled as not fair use, in spite of it being very newsworthy, because it was the most important 300 words -- why he pardoned Nixon.

Note that most inclusion of text in followups and replies is for commentary, and it doesn't damage the commercial value of the original posting (if it has any) and as such it is almost surely fair use. Fair use isn't an exact doctrine, though. The court decides if the right to comment overrides the copyright on an individual basis in each case. There have been cases that go beyond the bounds of what I say above, but in general they don't apply to the typical net misclaim of fair use.

The "fair use" concept varies from country to country, and has different names (such as "fair dealing" in Canada) and other limitations outside the USA.

Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted, but their expression and structure can. You can always write the facts in your own wordsthough

See the DMCA alert for recent changes in the law.

[Bahimiron]

She offers an enthusiastic 'thank you'.

[Miramon]

I've been looking into this professionally lately. I can't speak about academic fair use, but in general for commercial or even for personal use, images are very dangerous to try to use without permission.

Google gets a lot of free passes because a) their search engines go to pretty much every site, and they do it without human supervision or direction, and robots.txt is a well-known standard way to keep them off your site, and b) they display "transformed" thumbnails to begin with and then provide links and presentation in the context of the original site. So in effect they may sometimes afford someone else the ability to break copyright, but they have generally avoided claims that they are doing it themselves.

However, if you just take an image manually and use it, even with attribution, because you deliberately took that particular image, you are much more vulnerable. You have to pay attention both to the assumed copyright (all content is copyrighted even if you see no copyright declaration) and to terms of use/service on the source website, because it's assumed that in visiting that particular site for that image, you are also contractually bound by the terms of use.

I imagine most museums will look favorably on requests to use their images for academic purposes. Good luck even getting a response from a tourist site, though.

[MSUSteve]

She offers an enthusiastic 'thank you'.
Hopefully she offered you an "enthusiastic" thank you. *wink* *nudge* *giggle uncontrollably*

[Bahimiron]

She dumped me for Jensen Ackles. :(

[Coca Cola Zero]

More practical than legal here, but one avenue she might want to persue is looking for photos of the sites on micro stock photo sites like iStockphotos. If she can get official photos and the rights to use them for free, all the better, but if she has trouble or it is taking too long there are a few stock photo sites out there with very reasonable rates and large collections of pretty much any site of tourist interest and it would make the legal situation surrounding her use of the images a lot more easy/clear. In many cases the tourist sites she's currently using are probably using photos from these sites anyway and would just direct her there if they responded at all.

[Bahimiron]

Unfortunately, her photo needs are extremely specific. iStockphotos might have a picture of the Minoan Prince of Lilies at the Palace of Knossos, it's a lot less likely that someone would have the Left Facing Priestess' Seal, found at Agia Triadha.