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Review by Leila Kinney Robert Baron, ed. "Special Issue on Copyright and Fair Use: The Great Image Debate." Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation. (Amsterdam) 12, nos. 3-4 (1997): 233-458. $52.00 paper The "Great Image Debate" of the late twentieth century revolves not around religious or political doctrine but around intellectual property law. If you have not followed the debate, it is likely that your slide librarian has. Each of the sixteen contributions to this special issue of Visual Resources addresses in one way or another the furor over the legal status of the image that was unleashed by the Clinton administration's decision in 1994 to reconsider copyright law in light of new electronic technologies. Several of the contributors were participants in the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) meetings, which proposed guidelines for educational fair use of digital imagery. These guidelines are currently under consideration by CAA and other professional organizations. If the acronym CONFU sounds vaguely like a martial art, the association is apt. The guest editor, Robert Baron, even dubs some of the essays in this issue "battlefield literature." The article "View from the Trenches" by former CAA counsel Barbara Hoffman, the justification for the legality of copystand photography by Virginia M. G. Hall, and the analysis of positions taken in Caron L. Carnahan's "The Visual Surrogate as Intellectual Property: The Clinton Administration's `White Paper' and Its Implications for Visual Resources Collections" reveal the competing interests and the struggle for consensus that have characterized the process of ascertaining what is considered "fair use." Anyone not yet familiar with the four factors that currently govern the interpretation of fair use of copyrighted materials will certainly become so after reading this volume, in which they are rehearsed and projected into various classroom, museum, and commercial settings. The current state of affairs can best be described as a period of productive confusion, with legal concepts from the text-based regime of copyright at odds with the new realities of visual materials and digital technology. The confusion has reinvigorated discussions of the public sphere, the paradoxes inherent in reproductive photography of works of art, and the benefits of collective, custodial, or proprietary ownership of cultural property. It has even alerted unlikely audiences to just what the teaching and practice of art history is all about. Especially useful in this regard are essays by Christine Sundt and Maryly Snow, which place the use of technology in art historical pedagogy under scrutiny, and those articles that describe the distinctly mixed economy of the modern museum, in which educational, scholarly, promotional, and commercial activities coexist. An example of the latter, Peter Walsh's discussion of documentary photography by museums of artworks that are legally in the public domain, is fundamental to understanding what the furor is all about. In this context, a "copy" leverages a work of art no longer protected by copyright into an income-producing commodity, which would not be a problem if it did not confer the "bundle of rights" granted by copyright law upon the reproductive technology itself. This, in effect, extends a work's copyright in perpetuity. Reproductions generate the layers of rights (underlying work, published reproduction, slide made from a printed reproduction, and/or digital file produced from a scan) that have so confounded the design of efficient procedures for compliance, not to mention art criticism, commentary, research, and teaching--the very activities that limitations on the exclusive rights of copyright holders are meant to protect. A humorous commentary on the resulting thicket of rights can be found on the back cover of this issue of Visual Resources, where the exhaustive credits for the cover illustration, a digital "sample" of the Mona Lisa, are to be found. Ad infinitum absurdum. In the end, it is unlikely that the law, even when it provisionally has the last word, will have the latest word on uses of digital imagery in the classroom, artistic production, or scholarly publication, much less in society at large. It is significant then that three contributors to this issue of Visual Resources make clear how new entities are confronting the ambiguities, the inadequacies, or the balance of copyright law. One hopes that the emerging "image resource industry" (p. 236) can accommodate not just one but all of the digital equivalents of the institutions on which our profession depends: (1) a stock photo agency like Corbis, whose business plan is clearly described in the essay "Rights and Responsibilities in the Digital Age," by its legal representative, Karen Akiyama; (2) a consortium of museum rights and reproductions departments that intends to license the digital contents of museums for educational use such as the recently formed Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO), modeled on the Getty Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) described by Archives and Museum Informatics consultants David Bearman and Jennifer Trant in "Museums and Intellectual Property: Rethinking Rights Management for a Digital World"; and (3) the university slide library discussed in Alan Kohl's article "Prospects for a Public Domain Art Image Resource in an Era of Digital Technologies" on the demonstration project Art Images for College Teaching (AICT), which envisions a free or low-cost exchange source of digital imagery for academic institutions and individual scholars. For more information on the organizations discussed in this review, see the following sites: AICT: http://www.mcad.edu/AICT/index.html
--Leila Kinney, Electronic Editor CAA: www.collegeart.org Created 21 April 1997 VC Robert Baron Home Page | Robert Baron Copyright Index (last edited 12/2002) |