Copyright and Fair Use in Digital Projects

Image Usage

Photo: UN, 2013. Photo taken from NEPAD Agriculture in Africa Report. un.org/en/africa/osaa/pdf/pubs/2013africanagricultures.pdf 

• Use trustworthy repositories for photos
  • Start with lib.msu.edu
  • Trustworthy orgs (Local gov and cultural heritage, UN, World Bank, WHO, National Geographic, newspapers) 
• Make sure to cite your resources
  • Short citation style
• Be mindful of licensing and reuse

Image Usage

Photo: City University of New York Libraries. OA/OER Toolkit: Creative Commons. http://guides.cuny.edu/c.php?g=318026&p=2575196

• Copyright (US)
  • Applied to anything put in a fixed format
  • Creator owns right to use
• Public Domain
  • Creator waives copyright or copyright expires (pre-1922)
• Creative Commons Licenses
  • Author asserts specific rights guiding reuse

Copyright & Fair Use

• Current US Copyright: Author's life + 70 yrs (after 1922)
  • Enter 'Public Domain' after copyright expires
  • Works created & published outside of US have different licenses
• Fair Use - "the grayest area of copyright law"
  • “fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright"
• What about a digital photo of a public domain work?

Summarized from Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig, "Owning the Past," Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/

Citations

Best Practices

• Brief citations in parentheses OR footnotes using [1], [2]
• 'Works Cited' page or section at the end of each page
• Consult recommended Manual of Style

http://digitalhumanities.unl.edu/resources/

students/blocke/newsboys/background.html