Mini-Symposium on Images, Copyright and Fair Use I have to admit that when I first heard about this mini-symposium I assumed it was going to be boring because it was on what I previously thought was a dull topic. Copyright doesn’t exactly seem like a thrilling topic - however I was intrigued. The talk was beyond interesting and I took away much more than I had thought I would. The first half of the session involved us learning about general copyright laws and I learned so many things that could be considered “basic” but that I didn’t know. Everything that you create has a copyright. For me this completely changed the talk because I thought in order for something to be copyrighted it needed to be legally submitted as copyrighted material. Most copyrights last for the life of the author plus 70 years but copyrights can be transferred (ie to a museum or other person). If one signs away their right to something they have created, for example a section of one’s dissertation, then they no longer own the copyright and using their own work could be an issue of copyright infringement. The phrase I most enjoyed from this part of the talk was “real people do things but corporate entities own things.” We were shown multiple examples of cases in which corporate entities went against people due to what they considered was copyright infringement and were sometimes right but were mostly proved wrong. Learning all this information about copyrighting actually really scared me because it made me realize how many errors I make on a day to day basis without even knowing about it. Using photographs in a non-academic setting and simply citing the image but not asking for permission to use it is not considered acceptable. Certain things that we are told to do as assignments need to include much more thought because things that we consider okay to do are not necessarily legal. When one takes a photograph of a painting the copyright still belongs to the painter because it is an exact replica of the painting (it is not original), however we seem to think of this photograph as “ours” to then publish as we choose. After this lecture I am going to begin thinking a lot more about the sources of the images and the text I use every day to see if I can actually use them without encroaching on another’s rights. This lecture has made me a lot more tentative about my own artwork as well because it has made me realize that if all the people in that conference room were unaware of the things being taught then the rest of society is probably also unaware, and so where I post my work and what I do with it is going to be much more thought through that it would have been had I not attended this lecture. It was scary how little I knew about the things that I do on a regular basis. The afternoon session was really interesting because the questions that were asked were very relevant to art majors. Garrett asked whether the portfolio photographs that were taken belonged to him or to the photographer, which for me was the most thought-provoking question. The school brought in a photographer to teach students how to photograph their studio work, and at the end of the session provided the students with photographs he had taken of their work. We were told that it depends (as usual) and that if his work had been 2dimensional and was copied exactly using another 2-dimensional medium then the copyright still belonged to him because no originality was involved in the photographer’s work. This conclusion was challenged by the fact that Garrett’s work was 3-dimensional sculptures, and thus a completely different medium from photography. In this case the copyright would belong
to the photographer because of the photographer because of the artistic originality seen in the lighting of the image. In a sense both the photographer and the artist would own the copyright, but it was this grey area that got me thinking because this is the part where one must come up with a definition for art. I remember at the beginning of this course we were asked to define art and I found it nearly impossible to do so. By deciding who gets the rights to an image, one is deciding what is considered art in a way. In a similar way one has to make that decision when it comes to slogans. Michael passed out business cards last semester that had the sentence “I can’t breathe when you sleep” printed on them. He did this as a mix of social experiment and artistic exercise, however when he presented them as a question of copyright we were told that slogans aren’t considered copyright material. In this way something that the artist (Michael) had considered “art” was rejected by society as “not art” due to its lack of creativity I am assuming. When I asked the speaker about whether I would be able to use a font I had found online on t-shirts I was told that I would be able to with no issue because fonts are another thing that are not considered copyright material. It is things like this that make me wonder whether there actually is a definition for art that I am just not aware of. The fact that copyrighting material completely disregards certain things we consider art forms shows us that what is considered art must really be evolving day by day. I feel like students aren’t fully informed when it comes to copyrighting, and neither are adults when it comes down to it, and it is this ignorance that gets people into trouble sometimes. Copyrighting basics should be taught to all students I believe because otherwise they risk signing contracts they shouldn’t or uploading work to areas they shouldn’t or using work they don’t have the permission to use.