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Participant Statements
Session One
Peter Walsh:
The
Coy Copy: New Technologies and the Mysteries of Reproduction
This is about the historical definition of a "copy,"
how it is crucial to copyright in visual images, and why
ambiguities over its precise nature have been created by new
technology. Return
to Program Peter Walsh's Paper
Gary Schwartz:
No Fair!
Long-Term Prospects of Regaining Unencumbered Use
"In
essence, the history of modern copyright is the history of the
degree to which 'authors' [i.e. copyright holders] have succeeded
in finding support in society for legal protection of their
material and immaterial interests" (Grosheide).
In the current discussions on fair use, art historians are
positioned as copyright consumers, applying for special treatment
from copyright holders on idealistic grounds. This is an
unenviable position. The tide of legal favor is with copyright
holders, and they are not inclined to relinquish the increasingly
lucrative rights that are coming their way. Whatever exemptions
we may extract will not be universally granted, nor for very
long, and they will not be given with good grace. The doctrine of
fair use is too ill-defined to provide us with the right to use,
on our own terms, materials controlled by others. As things
stand, we are like the milch cow politely requesting the farmer
to abstain from milking her.
However, we can also take another stance in this matter. We can
also ride the rising tide of more powerful protection for
copyright holders. Just as increasing numbers of participants in
the arts are claiming protection for their work, so can we, as
scholars and teachers. We too are creators of valuable
intellectual property. In addition to the very limited degree to
which we now claim and collect royalties as individual copyright
holders, we can also lay claim to collective rights for the
attainments of art history as a field. Any use of the ideas,
knowledge and information we produce, by museums, image brokers,
the press or any other party, should be charged for at a rate
that would offset - at a premium - what we are being asked to
cede by pay of payment for and control of images.
Historically, scholars have lagged far behind writers, creative
artists and performing artists in asserting our claims as
producers of cultural goods. Now that our free access to the
basic materials with which we have always worked is being
blocked, the time has come to close the gap. In view of the
constant expansion of the boundaries for copyright being claimed
by other parties, this should not be difficult under prevailing
law.
At the same time, our adversary position vis-à-vis claimants on
copyright for teaching and research materials should be
sharpened. Their claims can be combated on grounds other than
fair use. Anti-trust law offers possibilities for acquiring
photographic material from museums via non-museum channels. And
once these photos exist, I am assured by counsel, museums have no
right to charge fees for reproducing them. The same applies to
illustrations derived from printed books. European anti-trust law
may provide better grounds for taking test trials to court. With
a careful campaign, we should be able to create legal precedent
for the right to unencumbered use of printed materials or photos
made on our own commission of works of art in the public domain. Return
to Program Gary Schwartz' Paper
David Green:
Your Copyright Future is Being Determined NOW!
This is a critical time in Congress for determining how we
operate in cyberspace. It's a critical time because in this
session one of two visions of what copyright is all about will be
enacted in a bill to revise copyright law for the digital era. It
is a critical time because the very notion of what copyright law
until now has been about is being challenged both from within and
without. Although the future may bring us a panoply of new
arrangements for the exchange of materials on the Web, I believe
copyright law is currently the best safeguard that creators,
owners and users of material have for a balance between private
interest and the public good.
Briefly I will summarize current copyright developments in
Congress, the forces behind them and the assumptions, visions and
principles these developments are built upon. This will include
reference to Fair Use, the now defunct Conference on Fair Use and
its proposed guidelines and the next steps forward for
establishing best practices in using and managing copyright
materials online, in the classroom, the studio and the study. Return to Program David Green's Paper
Top|Program | Statements | Biographies | Links
Participant
Statements
Session Two
Maxwell L. Anderson:
The presumed conflict between "Fair Use"
in the United States and the ability of rights holders to license
content stems from a misunderstanding. The Art Museum Image
Consortium (AMICO) will not seek to undermine Fair Use, or Fair
Dealing in Canada. AMICO's licenses are explicitly written to
state that they do not limit Fair Use. They include, for example,
features like remote access, manipulation for study purposes,
retention in a portfolio, and regular use in curricula. In
addition, licensing provides access to new forms of information
in new depths. Through AMICO the end user will be able to allow
access to a range of museum documentation not readily accessible
in other ways. The Art Gallery of Ontario, for example, with the
world's preeminent collection of Henry Moore's works, can add
video footage of Moore, letters between the Gallery and Moore,
and newspaper clippings of the controversy of his donation to the
Gallery. Numerous other advantages to AMICO will be discussed,
including how networked information will allow for more efficient
delivery of the information museums have been diligently
gathering for decades, consistency in authoritative data
available at multiple universities, better definition of the
needs of end users, the creation of a critical mass of
information, and a mechanism for ongoing data collection and
dissemination while holding the fee basis stable. Museums must
find a way to collaborate in the provision of collections
information, and AMICO is the most attractive option that has yet
come before North America's leading art museums. Return to
Program.
Howard Besser:
The concept of
Fair Use is absolutely critical to scholarship in the Humanities.
Various powerful forces have launched a major assault on Fair Use
in the digital realm. This is part of a general trend to
commodify information. Unless scholars and users vigorously
oppose the set of assaults on Fair Use, scholarship will severely
suffer, as will allied concepts such as access-to-information and
diversity. Return to Program.
Top | Program | Statements | Biographies | Links
Participant Biographies
Robert Baron:
Art historian and
arts informatics consultant (Harpur
College and IFA) specializes in information systems and
collection management issues relating to fine arts collections.
He has served as Museum Computer Consultant for the Art Museum of
Princeton University and has aided academic and scholarly museums
such as the Art Museum of the University of New Mexico and the
Walters Art Gallery. A number of his papers and collection
management guides may be found on his website.
During the 1960s and 1970s Mr.
Baron served on the faculties of the Fashion Institute of
Technology and the California State University at Fullerton.
Recently he has published papers on intellectual property as pertaining to the
scholarly and educational use of visual materials. For Visual
Resources he has guest edited the special edition Copyright and Fair Use: The Great Image
Debate. In
September 1997 he contributed two papers to the Portland Oregon Town Meeting on
Copyright that dealt
with CONFU and its aftermath. One paper discusses the challenge the CONFU guidelines put
to education, and the other outlines the dangers posed to educators and
scholars by the stipulations in the CONFU guidelines for the use
of digital materials.
Mr. Baron is co-chair (with Leila Kinney) of this Toronto Town Meeting, and has
been named as a forthcoming chair of the College Art
Association's Committee on Intellectual Property. He serves on
the advisory board of the Image
Directory, a
project of Academic Press.
Robert Baron also manages a
small business that provides slides and images of use to art
historians and teachers. He serves on the Board of Directors of
Bet Am Shalom, White Plains, NY and edits and publishes their
monthly newsletter. Articles and book reviews by Robert Baron may
be found in Museum Management and Curatorship and in Culturefront, a publication of the New
York State Council on the Humanities. Robert Baron is working on
a monograph on the French Renaissance book illustrator Bernard
Salomon which has been chosen to be part of The Illustrated
Bartsch. In addition, he has been promising himself to
finish an article on the eucharistic implications of Rubens' Triumph
of the Eucharist tapestries. His website has
become a focal point for Giocondaphiliacs. Return to Program.
Howard Besser:
Howard Besser (howard@sims.berkeley.edu) is Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley's
School of Information Management & Systems, where he teaches,
does research, and supervises a grant examining a
multi-institution digital library project. He also holds an
appointment at the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center. From 1994-96 he was on the faculty of
the University of Michigan's School of Information where he
headed a committee developing a curriculum in multimedia and
digital publishing. He has also been an Assistant Professor at
the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Besser's three main interest areas are Multimedia Databases
(particularly in cultural institutions), the social effects of
information technology, and the development of new ways to teach
with technology. He is currently working on a book on Image
Databases as part of the ASIS Monograph series, as well as a book
on the social effects of information technology. Under a grant
from the Kellogg Foundation to the University of Michigan to revamp curriculum, Howard chaired a subcommittee that examined the creation and design of
digital documents, and
another committee that was designing a new Information Studies
Media Lab.
Howard is also actively involved with museums. He has served on
the Management Committee of the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project since its inception. For several years
he was in charge of long-range information planning for the
Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and for many years
he headed information technology for Berkeley's University Art
Museum.
He travels a lot, speaks frequently at professional
conferences, gives workshops on Image Databases about half a
dozen times a year, and consults for libraries, museums, and
other institutions. For several years he has served as co-chair
of the American Library Association's Technology & the Arts Interest Group (co-sponsored by the
Association of College & Research Libraries and the Library
Information Technology Association). From January thru May of
1995 he taught a distance learning class in both Ann
Arbor and Berkeley
simultaneously, where students in both locations used multimedia
and networks to collaborate on projects. Return to Program.
David Green:
Director
of the new National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage
(NINCH), David Green has worked with the contemporary arts for
the past decade and has a doctorate in American Studies from
Brown University.
Most recently, as Director of Communications at the New York
Foundation for the Arts, Dr. Green was instrumental in the
development of Arts Wire, the nation's largest online network for
the arts community. At the same time, he also ran British Arts in
New York, a program that fostered and promoted British arts
expression in New York City. Return to Program David
Green's Paper
Leila W. Kinney:
Leila Kinney teaches in the
History, Theory, and Criticism section in of the School of
Architecture at MIT. She specializes in modern art and also
teaches course in the history of new visual technologies. She has
been involved in several areas of electronic publication:
creating "in-house" course materials for MIT's campus
network; writing position papers for the scholarly and teaching
constituency in CAA in response to CONFU; and establishing a
word-wide-web site for the College Art Association. She has
served as a member and Co-Chair of the CEI (the Committee on
Electronic Information) of the CAA and more recently as
Electronic Editor. Return to Program.
Gary Schwartz:
Gary
Schwartz (Brooklyn 1940) studied art history at NYU and Johns
Hopkins. In 1965 he moved to the Netherlands, where he has been
active as an art historian, translator, writer and publisher. His
publishing company was acquired in 1988 by the Dutch Government
Publishing Office, for which he ran the imprint Gary Schwartz |
SDU until 1991. His main books are Rembrandt, His Life, His
Paintings (1985), Pieter Saenredam: The Painter and His Time
(1990) and Bets and Scams: A Novel of the Art World (1996). His
most recent book is Hieronymus Bosch (1997), in the First
Impressions series published by Abrams for young readers.
Schwartz is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers in
the Netherlands, Germany and the US. He writes a bi-weekly column
on art history in the Dutch press, which is circulated in English
on Internet under the title Form Follows Dysfunction. In January
1998 he established CODART (Curators of Dutch Art), an
association for all those who fit the eponymous description.
Gary Schwartz, Herengracht 22, 3601 AM Maarssen, The
Netherlands Return to Program Gary Schwartz' Paper
Peter Walsh:
Peter
Walsh is in charge of new technology projects and external
relations at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley
College, which he joined in 1994. At the Davis, he has acted at
the Museum’s principal delegate to the planning sessions of
the Art Museum Image Collaborative AMICO) of which the Davis is a
founding member. Prior to coming to Wellesley, he served as a
communications and publications specialist at the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, and as director of information and publications at
the Harvard University Art Museums. Currently chairman of the
Massachusetts Art Commission, he has published, lectured, and
taught on political issues in the visual arts, the impact of new
technologies on culture, and on issues in copyright and
intellectual property. He holds degrees in art history from
Oberlin College and Harvard University, where he also studied
design and business management. Return to Program. Peter
Walsh's Paper
Top|Program | Statements | Biographies | Links
Additional On-Line Resources
Only a few of the
many copyright online resources are listed below.
Each of the hyperlinks below leads to lists of important sources.
Several
Key Copyright Websites:
USPTO: US Patent
and Trademark Office
NINCH: Copyright
Resources:
NINCH: Town
Meetings and other Events:
NINCH: Summary
Report on Town Meetings:
University of
Texas:
Copyright
Websites with special significance for the Visual Arts:
Christine
Sundt's Copyright Page:
Visual Resources
Association Copyright Page:
On
image licensing for academia and scholarship:
NINCH: Licensing
Resources and Issues
[
MESL: Museum
Educational Site Licensing Project ]dead
link 2002 instead see the following Getty publications:
http://www.getty.edu/bookstore/titles/deliv.html and
http://www.getty.edu/bookstore/titles/images.html
also consult Howard Besser's MESL reports:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon/99press-release.html
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon/
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon/toc.html
and on the controversy regarding this Toronto session:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon/Fairuse/historical.html
and associated links on this page
AMICO: Art
Museum Image Consortium
[
MDLC: Museum
Digital Licensing Collective, Inc. ]dead
link 2002
Top|Program | Statements | Biographies | Links
Audio Cassette Information
Audio Cassettes of
the "Town Meeting" are available from Audio Archives
& Duplicators Inc., 100 West Beaver Creek, Unit 18, Richmond
Hill, Ontario L4B 1H4 (905) 889-6555, Fax: (905) 889-6566,
e-mail: archives@idirect.com. Ask for tape 980225-165/166 "Town
Meeting on Fair Use of Digital Images: Parts I & II.
($20US/$29CDN) Refer to vendor for ordering information.
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