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Roles and Responsibilities for Staff Involved in Building Digital Image Collections

Last updated: 09 October 2006
Published in: Digitising analogue media
Tags: business & community engagement | copyright | digital collections

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Summary

Creators of digital image collections, have important choices, decisions and responsibilities. This paper examines the role of copyright for staff who may be involved in the building of image collections.

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Why is copyright important to staff involved in building image collections?
  3. Stages in the clearance of images for use in building digital image collections
  4. Further resources and information

1. Introduction

This short paper will examine the role of copyright for staff who may be involved in the building of image collections, which may include the following types of activities:

  • Large-scale digitisation projects for Internet or intranet display
  • Digital slide libraries
  • Creating image databases for VLEs
  • Building digital records of student works
  • Preservation and conservation of format of digital and analogue resources
  • Building an image repository

In order to understand the essential issues about copyright, this paper should be read in conjunction with JISC Digital Media's Copyright and Digital Images advice document.

2. Why is copyright important to staff involved in building image collections?

As creators of digital image collections, you have important choices, decisions and responsibilities. You can decide to keep your digital images for your own purposes, or provide broader access or even exploit them. With these choices also come decisions regarding the extent that, for example, you want to grant access, under what terms and for how long. In addition, you will also need to decide how you will use technology to support your decisions. However, these choices and decisions will be underpinned by the legal requirement that before you embark upon your activities relating to building your image collections, you have:

  • Determined you own all the rights in the digital content that you are creating, which is likely to be the case in work created by academic staff during the course of their employment. However, JISC Digital Media recommends that you check first the contracts and conditions of employment at your institution in order to clarify this.
  • Determined the content is out of copyright. However, it is important to remember that many digital images will include layers of rights issues. Please see JISC Digital Media's Copyright and Digital Images advice document for further information.
  • Checked the agreements that have been made with any funding bodies to ensure that there are no terms and conditions which might restrict your ability to make digital resources available.
  • Secured permission from all rights holders either directly or via licensing schemes.

These copyright and other rights-related issues will be fundamental to the assembly of an image collection because the more people that are allowed access to the digitised image, without rights permission having been secured first, the greater the risk of infringement and possible subjection to a variety of remedies by the rights holders (see JISC Digital Media's advice document on Copyright and Digital Images for further information). It is therefore crucial that copyright is treated as one of the key initial components of all digitisation projects, because if you have not secured the appropriate rights, you may find that your digital images cannot be used at all. The process chart and associated eight stages below, map out some of the key milestones and issues relating to rights which should be factored into basic project planning and resource management.

Table 1 - Process chart for clearing rights in images to be used for building digital image collections (please click image for full version)

Process chart for clearing rights in images to be used for building digital image collections

3. Stages in the clearance of images for use in building digital image collections

Stage 1 - What do you want to use and how do you anticipate the image is going to be used?

  • Think about the nature of the images that you wish to publish and consider their intended use.
  • There may be a range of potential sources for digital images which might include: images that are commissioned; images provided by commercial picture libraries; free images for use by the FE and HE communities; and digitisation of resources. In all these cases, JISC Digital Media recommends that you check the specific terms and conditions to ensure that you have the appropriate permissions to access, search and reuse any of these resources for your purposes.
  • At this stage, it is also advisable to understand the resources that are available to you for clearing rights, which should include both human resources as well as financial resources, associated costs and budgeting implications.

Stage 2 - Understand the rights associated with the digital images

  • Many images may include more that one layer of rights issues.
  • The quantity of rights that need to be considered and possibly cleared, will vary depending on whether the material in born digital or a digital surrogate - the latter is likely to include additional layers of rights in the content that is digitised.
  • Identify any third party rights within images that need to be cleared. For example, an image of a child eating a well known chocolate bar will include the rights of the child requiring clearance in accordance with the Human Rights Act, as well as possible use of trademarks. Other rights that may need to be cleared include Data Protection, Performance Rights, Moral Rights and any other type of Intellectual Property Right. More about this can be found in JISC Digital Media's advice document on Copyright and Digital Images.

Stage 3 - Identifying the rights holders

  • Identify who owns the rights in the images that you wish to exploit.
  • Rights in images may belong to your institution if created by staff; they may be licensed to the institution if created by students; belong to the commissioning party if the work is carried out by a consultant or contractor; be administered by a collecting society; or not immediately apparent if the image is provided by an image supplier, scanned from an unknown source or sourced from the Internet.
  • Tracing rights holders can be one of the most time intensive elements of rights clearance and this will need to be factored into the overall strategy for your project. More information about tracing rights holders can be found in the How to Clear Rights factsheet (PDF) from Collections Link.
  • If you cannot find the rights holders or they do not respond, you will need to ensure that you have carried out extensive attempts to find them and kept a paper file for this purpose in accordance with "due diligence". Due diligence will not eliminate your risks of infringing rights, but considered together with a risk assessment, can assist your institution in deciding whether it is sensible to use the images or not.

Stage 4 - Clearing rights

  • You will need written permission in order to use the images in the ways that you want.
  • Make sure that you request permission in accordance to what you want to do with the images, how you will be treating the images (i.e. any interaction, manipulation or alteration of the images), who will access them and under what terms. You will not be able to provide access to images in the ways that you want unless the rights holders have explicitly agreed to this type of re-use.
  • These permissions will be those that are negotiated on a transactional basis such as the case of work commissioned by third party consultants, digitisation of collections or access to digital images supplied by third parties. Alternatively, the CLA Scanning Licence may, in limited circumstances, cover your purposes, although it is important to stress that the CLA licence will not permit you to scan and aggregate digital images into a collection. More information on this licensing scheme can be found in the Copyright and Digital Images paper.
  • Permission can be in the form of letters, licences, or more formal contracts. This will depend on your requirements and those of the rights holders that are granting you permission.

Stage 5 - Managing digital rights

  • Once secured, all rights will need to be managed appropriately to ensure that there is a central place for recording the range of agreements which you are likely to have secured. You may wish to record your rights in compliance with recognised international documentation standards, such as SPECTRUM.
  • Key issues will include:
  • Who will be responsible for looking after you copyright or the rights that are licensed to you?
  • What is your institution's position if someone asks for permission to use one of your images?
  • What metadata will be needed to hold all the relevant information, including the copyright metadata about the images?
  • How will this metadata be stored?
  • For more information on this issue, see the JISC Digital Media advice paper on Systems for Managing Digital Media Collections.

Stage 6 - Protecting digital images

  • It may be within the terms and conditions of your agreements with rights holders that you need to take responsibility for protecting digital images once they are displayed and or you feel that it is important to protect users from inappropriately reusing your images.
  • Credit lines and display of digital images in low resolution (480 by 640 pixels maximum) are typical low/no cost ways of protecting content.
  • Off the shelf solutions include watermarking, and time and access limitation which can all provide ways of protecting your property and that belonging to third parties.
  • The technology used in this area changes very rapidly and there are continuous advancements which, whilst not entirely effective against infringements and privacy, will provide a useful deterrent. In some cases they may provide further details about who is using your images and for what purposes.

Stage 7 - Providing access to digital images

  • Any choices that you make regarding access must be in line with the terms of the permission to use the images (see Stage 4 above).
  • It is important to realise that the more access you grant, the less control you may have over the images. It is a fine balance!
  • When providing access, think about educating your users through the use of copyright statements, notices and credit lines.
  • Consider whether some images may be made freely available whilst others are restricted. Sometimes it is useful or necessary to make some images available to all users at a range of qualities and sizes, whilst others are only available to those with permission to see them or only at certain, smaller sizes. Access control systems such as ATHENS (http://www.athens.ac.uk/) will be able to provide you with the ability to control who can access what content, whilst SHIBBOLETH will be able to provide additional levels of granular access that your users may want.
  • Will some users have different viewing rights to others and if so, how will this be controlled and monitored? Sometimes it can be useful to control the 'user' rather than the 'image'. In practice, if you wish to control usage, it is likely that you will need to limit access to both 'images' and 'users' so a mixture of both approaches will be called for.
  • Are your images for public use? Who currently has access to your images? Do these images create any income for you at present? Do you or your funders want this collection to be available to a wider audience or are they only to be available to a known and limited audience? Will they be used as a learning and teaching resource only for academia or as a general resource for the wider public?

Stage 8 - Using digital images

  • Careful thought needs to be given into how digital images might be accessed. Whilst open access is important to achieve the primary aims of Further and Higher education institutions, there may be strategic reasons why it may not be appropriate for some images to be made available in this way. For example, some content may be commercially sensitive (particularly for fee-paying courses), have a commercial value, or ensure the sustainability of a project and as such, hasty decisions can cut across these commercial concerns. This is an area that you may need to explore in more detail depth and discuss within your Institution prior to coming to a decision. Remember that providing access via the Internet is publishing and if images are too valuable to make globally accessible, you should not put them up!
  • Creative Commons licences can offer you the opportunity to licence digital images to users under specific licensing terms of your choice. In order to use a pre-devised licence template, like Creative Commons, it is important that one of the following situations applies:
    • Your institution owns the rights in the images which you wish to licence
    • Your institution has permission from third party rights holders to make content available under Creative Commons
    • There are no rights issues in the digital images (which is unlikely).
  • Further advantages and disadvantages of using Creative Commons licences can be found in the table below:
Advantages of using Creative Commons Disadvantages of using Creative Commons
Creative Commons licences provide creators of material with the opportunity of freeing up access to their digital images and thus receiving more open access. In accordance with their terms of use, Creative Commons licences cannot be used in conjunction with technical protection mechanisms, which might restrict users from being able to benefit from the terms of the licensing agreements.
Creative Commons licences are recognised globally: they are also linked to various search engines and have a high international recognition. The broad definition of 'non-commercial' could exceed your Institution's access philosophy as well as potentially undermine your institution's excusive rights to commercially exploit its content. You should think carefully before permitting access under such a broad licence.
The licences use easily recognised symbols to depict specific terms. Creative Commons licences are irrevocable, world-wide and for the duration of the copyright. Suppliers of digital images need to be aware of the extent of usage which this licence will permit.
The provision of easy to use boiler plate licences are available in a readable form, a more comprehensive legal format and also in machine-readable code. Creative Commons licences do not contain clauses which control the context of use (i.e. they do not deal with the use of digital images in obscene, libellous or inappropriate contexts). Additional terms and conditions might need to be used in association with Creative Commons licences to further specify how your digital images can be used, as long as these do not restrict the terms of the Creative Commons licences. The danger of this is that because content licensed under Creative Commons is picked up by search engines, users may only be aware of the Creative Commons licences attached to the image or alternatively choose to ignore additional licensing terms. In these cases, it might be worth considering the overall benefits of licensing content out under Creative Commons and whether robust terms and conditions might be more suitable.

4. Further resources and information

Advisory services

In-depth resources

Licensing agencies and clearance services

Sources of images

Last updated: 09 October 2006
Published in: Digitising analogue media
Tags: business & community engagement | copyright | digital collections

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