Kip Currier, IP, AI & OM; Hell is Clearing Permissions: Looking for Lifelines and Deliverance [5,000th post since this blog started in 2008]:
Hell is Clearing Permissions: Looking for Lifelines and Deliverance
French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre famously opined "L'enfer, c'est les autres (Hell is other people). This post won't be weighing in on the nuances of that declaration by a character in his 1944 play Huit Clos (No Exit) -- although candidates who could easily qualify as diabolic "other people" may spring to mind for you too.
However, thinking about an array of challenging experiences I've had while working on clearing permissions for the use of images and textual material in my forthcoming textbook, Ethics, Information, and Technology, I thought of Sartre's grim observation, with a twist: Hell is clearing permissions.
I've been teaching a Copyright and Fair Use course since 2009, which expanded into an IP and Open Movements around 2015, so I'm neither new to copyright law and fair use issues nor unfamiliar with clearing permissions to use images. Graduate students in the course read Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression and Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi's Reclaiming Fair Use: How To Put Balance Back In Copyright, both of which deal with "permissions culture". I also have my students get familiar with permissions issues via a free comic book, Bound By Law?, composed by Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The "Bound By Law?" authors, Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins, chronicle real-life travails faced by creators lawfully trying to exercise fair use while creating new works and balancing licensing costs. One of my favorite examples in the book is the documentary film makers who happen to capture images from an episode of The Simpsons displayed on a TV set while filming what goes on in the backstage lives of stagehands working on The Wagner Ring Cycle opera.
Yet, despite fairly significant copyright and fair use knowledge, as well as frequently participating in copyright webinars and trainings, this is the first time I've worked on clearing permissions for a book of my own. The experiences have been eye-opening to say the least. Two insights and "needs" continue to jump out at me:
- (1) the need for more responsive, user-friendly, and expedient ways to clear permissions, and
- (2) the need for more accessible and readily understandable information sources to aid authors in the do's and don'ts of clearing permissions.
I do need to acknowledge the many contributions that copyright and fair use scholars Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, mentioned above, have made in bringing together collaborative groups that have created "Best Practices" primers for a number of areas, such as their 2012 Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries.
Much more can be done, though, to help newer authors and creators, as well as seasoned pros, to navigate hurdles and potential pitfalls of securing permission to use images. Information professionals -- librarians and other staff within libraries, archives, and museums, for example -- are well-equipped and positioned to use their unique skill sets to help creators to successfully maneuver through clearing permissions-related "obstacle courses".
In future posts, I'll share insights, lessons learned, and tips on mitigating "hellish" experiences and moving from uncertain "limbo" to more clarity on image permissions.
