CAA News Today

Professors Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi are now in the second phase of CAA’s Fair Use Initiative. The first phase, begun in January 2013, involved interviews with visual arts professionals regarding the use of third-party materials in their creative work and publications. The interviews were summarized by Aufderheide and Jaszi and published by CAA earlier this year: https://www.collegeart.org/news/2014/01/29/caa-publishes-fair-use-issues-report/

This week, Aufderheide and Jaszi completed the last of ten discussion group meetings held over the past few weeks in New York, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles, in which visual arts professionals explored various situations where fair use can be invoked when using third-party materials and images. Each discussion group consisted of ten to twelve artists, art historians, museum directors, curators, and editors, who were presented with hypothetical scenarios based on the Issues Report. The ensuing discussions have been intense and extremely valuable, providing insights into broadly shared standards for relying on fair use when using copyrighted material.

In the third phase of the project Aufderheide and Jaszi will use the results of the discussion groups to synthesize a code of best practices. A preliminary draft will be reviewed by the Task Force on Fair Use, the Committee on Intellectual Property, the project advisors, and a Legal Advisory Committee before a final version is presented to the CAA Board of Directors for approval.

CAA is pleased to announce the appointment of new advisors to the Fair Use Initiative. Chris Sundt, Editor, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation and past chair of the CAA Committee on Intellectual Property; and Paul Catanese, Director of Interdisciplinary Arts & Media MFA Program, Columbia College Chicago and past chair of the CAA New Media Caucus have agreed to serve in this capacity. The advisors will contribute to the review of the draft code, propose possible candidates for the legal review committee and assist in the dissemination of the code once the CAA Board of Directors has approved it.

A report on the Fair Use Initiative will be presented at the Annual Conference in New York in February 2015.