Remember to follow copyright laws

In the hustle of trying to put together exhibits and publications, it can be easy to forget about copyright laws. In fact, when dealing with history, many items are over 75 years old and are considered part of the public domain, making it easy for us to use them at will. But two current situations concerning copyright infringement made me want to write a little about it here. Please remember I am not a lawyer nor a specialist in copyright law, but the basics are easy enough to discern through basic common sense and ethics.

The first situation is one of trying to avoid copyright infringement. In one project I am working on, we are compiling a database of research pertinent to the 1813 attack by the British on Havre de Grace, Maryland, during the War of 1812. One of the first questions to come up was “How much of our research can we include in this database?” which we plan to make available online for free. We are still working through this and will likely have to make judgement calls on each individual item. Some items are part of the public domain. Others are owned by Historical Societies, and we will have to buy the rights for use. For others, we will just provide a hyperlink to the organization that owns the item. We have also spoken to the legal departments of historical newspaper databases to learn the law as they see it. In a nutshell, even though the content of historical newspapers is in the public domain if it is over 75 years old, the database companies who make the newspapers available digitally own the copyright to the digital copies. I assume that if we wanted to go out and find actual hard copies of the historical newspapers and transcribe what we need, we could post the transcriptions for free. But if we plan to use the digital version provided by databases – and we do – we will have to pay for the rights. We are still navigating all this, so if you have experience, please weigh in below!

The second copyright situation involves a friend of mine, who is a professional photographer. He also takes photos for his own enjoyment and posts them to his blog, complete with copyright information embedded into the images. He recently received a magazine from one of his hobbies, and saw one of his images in an ad for a product! He had not been contacted by this company to ask for usage of this photo – they simply took it off his website and stripped the copyright data. My experience in graphic design tells me that this could simply have been a mistake. When clients send me images for use in print, I assume they have cleared all copyright hurdles. If I go out and search for images for the client’s piece, I am sure to tell them about the price to buy the rights, and usually handle the transaction myself. It is possible my friend’s image was used because organization and designer didn’t have the appropriate conversation about copyright. Hopefully, when my friend contacts them, they will apologize and pay him what they owe him. But it serves as a lesson in caution for those of us in museums…be careful that you aren’t using photography that you don’t own. If you pay a photographer to photograph your site, make sure you have a contract that dictates ownership, usage, and credit. The internet makes things more complex, but you can’t just “grab” a photo off  someone else’s page, no matter if it is a Flickr page, blog, or Facebook album. The person who took that photograph owns it, even if it is of your museum site. But likely, if you contact them, they will let you use it – and maybe even for free since you are a non-profit.

I ran into a situation a few years ago, where I took some photographs at a historic site and used one of them in some of my advertising. The organization contacted me and asked if I owned the photographs – and I did, as I had taken them. But they continued to explain that one of the images I used was an architectural detail that they base their logo on. I immediately offered to stop using the photo. In the museum world, I feel we need to help each other protect what is unique about each site, and I certainly didn’t want to step on their brand identity. It was an honest mistake on my part, and one I was willing to correct. The museum understood I meant no harm and offered to let me continue using the photo, but asked if I would identify their site in a photo credit. We ended up compromising – I stopped using the photo related to their logo altogether, and gave them site recognition in another photo I was using on a website. I hope that in any copyright issues you may run into, you are met with the same collegial attitude.