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Educational Image Site-Licensing Debated: the moderator's introduction
Toronto
Town Meeting Program | Author's Biography by Leila W. Kinney Before introducing the speakers and suggesting some protocols for the debate, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the distance we've come and to suggest several possible areas of discussion that the prospect of licensing museum images for educational use might engage. I want to emphasize the human factor, because so many of the discussions of digital imagery seem to turn either on technical standards or legal technicalities. At the beginning of this CONFU process, many of us who worked in nonprofit or educational settings with visual materials felt stunned, I think, to realize that early drafts of the guidelines for fair use of digital imagery veered towards criminalizing our habits of research, teaching, and amassing personal visual archives in order to support these activities. Although the guidelines remained unendorsable to CAA and to many of the organizations with which we are affiliated, I want to remark how far we have moved from that depressing beginning. We are here today to contemplate the prospect of a visual archive of high quality digital images created predominantly for educational use. This raises the prospect of escaping the "image ghetto" to which teaching and research in the visual arts was, paradoxically, being consigned, because of the rising cost of reproductions of any kind (which preceded digitization) and the attempt further to restrict their unfettered use to "thumbnails" in the transition to digital media. It may also reverse the tendency that emerged during the CONFU process to create internal division within the university and among art professionals. The reality on the ground is that university counsel set guidelines, some stricter than the current state of the law dictates, slide curators and librarians have to take a position on enforcing them, and teaching faculty at the end of this regulatory chain are put in an untenable situation, a situation that they feel restricts their ability to use the tools of their trade. [Some of the draft guidelines that we rejected even envisioned our then taking on this enforcement role with our students.] The AMICO licenses repeatedly state that they will be based upon the principle of trusting the universities, which is a welcome change. But will signing contracts that dictate the terms of use alleviate or exacerbate this problem? To put it another way: is it really necessary to create a situation in which we need to read contracts and take copyright seminars as we prepare to teach? What seems so odd about so many of the discussions of the "use" part of fair use is the assumption that there are two homogenous communities, the producers and the consumers. In fact, one of the realizations that has emerged from this ongoing debate is that producers of intellectual property are all at times dependent upon fair use, upon a zone of freedom that allows knowledge to move forward. In the best scenario, the prospect of a well-documented, high quality image library allows art historians to collaborate more effectively with the museum. In the worst, they are put into the passive state of consumers of the museum's digital goods. This false idea of an easily segregated community of producers and consumers may, in the conception of this licensing project, be compounded by a technical fallacy--the assumption that we are all going to use the digital imagery that is delivered to us in the same way. The terms of these licenses seem to build in a zone of freedom after delivery of the imagery, but why is it so tenuous? [The term of the license is one year]. Licensing seems precisely designed to end-run the flexibility of re-use that the doctrine of first sale for fixed media allowed. Why is this necessary? Finally, I want to raise a question about the function of the university and its relationship to individual faculty (and, to a lesser extent, students) that the licensing proposals seem to assume. The increasing reliance on "copyright-compliance zoning" raises the unpleasant image of a fortress university, at worst, and at best, the unfortunate history of the policy in the United States of tying health insurance to one's job and frequently, to large employers. It leaves many people stranded and may decrease mobility in the job market. Tying digital resources to temporary contracts with institutions, when faculty move frequently among them seems like a poor idea from a public policy standpoint. Do the “portfolio” provisions allow adequately for portability of the visual archives to which scholars may also “add value,” to use the marketing jargon that has befallen us? I will excuse myself from the obligation of properly introducing AMICO itself, for two reasons: first, it will be covered in a session on Friday morning (announce), and I trust, most of the relevant questions will be answered by people more familiar with the project, including Max Anderson and Howard Besser, whom I will now introduce. Toronto
Town Meeting Program | Author's Biography
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