Illustrated lectures and copyright

[David Edge]

I recently made a six-hour journey to talk about a photograph at an arts centre and was prevented from doing so because of alleged copyright infringement - I had scanned the photo from a book as there was no image online larger than a postage stamp.

 

Now I had foolishly relied on fair use and believed that projecting an image while providing attribution for a few minutes fell well within ‘fair’!

 

So I’m not caught out again, does anybody know of any authoritative guidelines or best practice on this? For a living artist I’d expect to drop a courtesy note (and take no reply as yes), but for a deceased one I can’t imagine contacting the executors and the publishers of the book for each image.

David Edge 

[Michael Pritchard]

Images being online does not mean that they are in the public domain from a copyright perspective. 

Ted Richards said:

I think the art centre people were being ultra pedantic.  When you are making no other use of the photograph than to illustrate a talk I would class that as 'fair dealing'.

The other thing is that you said that there were images online, implying that they were the same and in the public domain.  So if you had scanned the online image, albeit smaller than the book illustration, what would their attitude have been?  Same image, different source.

[David Edge]

Thanks Ted

Interestingly, when I contacted the gallery that owns the copyright they did ask for acknowledgement of both gallery and photographer and warning of what I was going to say - but they would have provided a hi-res image. So in future if I were to be talking about a particular photographer I would make the effort to get in touch. But it's just too much trouble if you were going to do a general review of a period or a genre.