CAA News Today
CAA to Publish Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — February 04, 2015
On February 9, 2015, in time for the Annual Conference, CAA will publish the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, a set of principles addressing best practices in the fair use of copyrighted materials based on a consensus of opinion developed through discussions with visual-arts professionals. It will be a vital resource for all those working in the field, including artists, art historians, museum professionals, and editors.
Printed copies of the Code will be available at Registration at the conference and at the CAA booth in the Book and Trade Fair throughout the week. It will also be available online beginning February 9.
If you are attending the conference, please come to an introductory presentation about the Code on Friday, February 13, 12:30–2:00 PM, in the Trianon Ballroom, Third Floor, New York Hilton Midtown.
CAA’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with additional support provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
CAA Update from the President
posted by DeWitt Godfrey — November 13, 2014
DeWitt Godfrey, professor of art and art history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, is president of the CAA Board of Directors.
CAA is moving ahead on several strategic goals. After a year of investigation and discussion with over 200 artists, art historians, curators, editors and reproduction rights officers, Professors Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi are drafting the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use in the Visual Arts which will be reviewed by the Task Force on Fair Use, the Committee on Intellectual Property, the Professional Practices Committee, and an independent Legal Advisory Committee. We anticipate that the code will be presented at the Annual Conference in February 2015.
At the October 26th Board meeting, the formation of two task forces was approved: one to review CAA’s governance structure, and one to review its professional committees. As a greater number of faculty are now part-time, the board and committee requirements have to be adjusted so that the best expertise is brought to CAA within the most economical timeframes. The Board also had a lively discussion on the best directions to be taken regarding advocacy and how CAA can respond quickly and efficiently to issues that affect members’ daily work. We are exploring the creation of a task force on advocacy.
The CAA Board and senior staff held a day-long retreat which focused on a vision for the future of the annual conference—a more flexible structure, greater opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion, serving the needs and interests at each stage of a career in the visual arts, and the ability to quickly address issues that arise in the field, have an international perspective and participation, and reach those members who are not able to attend the conferences.
New, updated volumes of the Directories of Graduate Programs are now available through CAA’s website. From the data published in the directories, CAA will draw statistical information about all the visual-arts subdisciplines, mapping important changes in the field regarding enrollment and employment. We plan to make information from the past four years available to members in the coming months.
The September issue of The Art Bulletin features the third essay in the “Whither Art History?” series, as well as essays on Jan van Eyck and commemorative art, Hans Burgkmair and recognition, Watteau and reverie, and contemporary Indian Art from the 1985-86 Festival of India. The latest issue of Art Journal includes a forum called “Red Conceptualismos del Sur/Southern Conceptualisms Network,” featuring articles printed in their original Spanish and Portuguese alongside new English translations—this is the first foray into multilingual publishing for CAA. Art Journal Open’s first web editor, Gloria Sutton, associate professor at Northeastern University, has commissioned features from the artist Karen Schiff and the new-media historian Mike Maizels, as well as a dialogue between the curator Becky Huff Hunter and the artist Tamarin Norwood. The vision for this website is to provide an online space for artists’ works, experimental scholarship, and conversations among arts practitioners. And caa.reviews, now open access, includes nearly 2,500 reviews of books, exhibition catalogues, and conferences on art, as well as an annual list of completed and in-progress art history dissertations. Thirty-four field editors commission reviewers to address new publications, exhibitions, and exhibition catalogues and videos in every area of the visual arts. The new copublishing relationship between CAA and Taylor & Francis that supports all three CAA journals will complete its first year this month with a marked increase in readership. We are encouraging authors to use the multimedia resources offered at Taylor & Francis Online as well as its citation app.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CAA and the Society for Architectural Historians a grant to cooperatively carry out research and develop guidelines in digital art and architectural history for promotion and tenure in the workforce. With the increased use of digital platforms in research and publishing there is a need for guidelines that reflect the best practice in evaluating digital art and architectural history. A task force will be formed of two art historians, two architectural historians, a librarian, a museum curator, a scholar from another humanities or social science field with expertise in digital scholarship, and a graduate student or emerging professional in art history or architectural history. CAA will hire a part-time researcher to gather information on current practices from faculty members throughout the country. Please see the Online Career Center for the listing.
CAA, like other learned, membership societies, faces significant challenges and opportunities for the future. The changing landscape of publication, academic workforce issues, advocating for the arts and humanities, serving a changing membership and the field are areas where CAA has and will continue to make a difference, by building on our legacy of leadership and embracing the necessary changes required to meet our mission and vision.
Art Authentication Protection Bill
posted by Linda Downs — March 27, 2014
An important and potentially precedent-setting Bill (S13.04) has been introduced into the New York State Assembly: http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=S06794&term=2013&Summary=Y&Actions=Y&Text=Y. This legislation has been introduced to offer protections to art historians, art curators, independent art scholars, conservators, and other qualified experts who submit good faith opinions on the authenticity, attribution, or authorship of works of art from unsubstantiated law suits. This Bill has the support of the New York City Bar Association Art Law Committee and the Center for Art Law in New York.
Your Assemblyman/woman in the New York State Assembly needs to hear directly from you. Please send a letter, email or phone message supporting passage of this Bill by the New York State Assembly: http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/.
Sincerely,
Anne Collins Goodyear, President
Linda Downs, Executive Director and CEO
CAA Participates in Roundtables on “Orphan Works and Mass Digitization”
posted by Linda Downs — March 26, 2014
On March 10–11, 2014, the United States Copyright Office (USCO) held a series of public roundtables in Washington, DC, exploring the question of “Orphan Works and Mass Digitization.”[1] Collectively, these discussion panels constituted a follow up to a Notice of Inquiry circulated by USCO in the fall of 2012, in response to which CAA filed reply comments in March 2013.[2] Given CAA’s long advocacy of legislation to offer protection to those individuals and institutions using orphan works, and after consulting with CAA members familiar with concerns related to orphan works,[3] I represented the organization in two sessions, one addressing the “Types of Works Subject to Orphan Works Legislation, Including Issues Related Specifically to Photographs” (Session 4) and the other “Types of Users and Uses Subject to Orphan Works Legislation” (Session 5).[4]
“Orphan works” constitute a class of materials for which no copyright owner can be located.[5] They have long posed a thorny challenge for scholars or artists who might seek to reproduce them, but who cannot locate the creator or a source from which to license them for purposes not considered “fair use.” As a publisher of leading journals—Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and caa.reviews—and an advocate for its members who might similarly seek to use orphan works, CAA has consistently argued in favor of orphan works legislation that 1) would significantly limit the liability of a user of an orphan work who had executed a diligent search for the work’s copyright owner, and 2) provide a safe harbor for not-for-profit cultural institutions, engaged in non-commercial activities, that had exercised similar care and that took steps to cease the infringement. At the same time, CAA has spoken to the importance of the attribution of the work and has argued that if a copyright holder comes forward that rights holder be entitled to a reasonable licensing fee if, indeed, the use is not considered “fair” as allowed under the law.
Consistent with positions taken by CAA previously, the organization argued that all copyrighted works, including photographs, should be protected by orphan works legislation. Photographs, which can be notoriously difficult to associate with their makers, have proven particularly tricky as a group of objects, actually being excepted from a directive, intended to facilitate the non-commercial public interest use of orphan works, passed by the European Union.[6] However, not to consider photographs as part of the larger category of orphan works would be extremely limiting from the perspective of CAA given the strong interest of its members in sources of visual information. Categorically excluding photographic and other works of visual art from orphan works eligibility would disadvantage users of images, including artists, scholars, and publishers, who would face continued risks of being sued for copyright infringement despite being unable to determine the identity of the copyright owner at the time of their use. The purpose of orphan works legislation is to mitigate the legal risk of using works that are part of our shared culture. It is because those risks can have chilling implications, adversely affecting creative work by artists and scholars, that CAA has been committed to support orphan works legislation.
Given the diverse range of purposes to which copies of orphan works might be put by its members, CAA has argued that both commercial and non-commercial uses of such material should be protected, given the extraordinary difficulty of teasing apart such interests. Because artists (like scholars) can be both creators and users of copyrighted items, they may seek to make and market work incorporating reproductions of orphan works. In similar fashion, academic or independent scholars or museum professionals make seek to illustrate orphan works in publications made available for sale. While recognizing that a voluntary registry (or registries) of copyrighted works, such as photographs might be useful, CAA does not endorse requiring such registration, nor does it feel that the terms of a “diligent search” for the holders of copyright of orphaned works should be prescribed, arguing instead that the best approach to such research would be better determined on a case-by-case basis.
Although previous legislation, S. 2913 (the Shawn Bentley Act) faltered in the House of Representatives in 2008, and was thus not enacted into law, USCO is now reexamining the potential value of pursuing orphan works legislation anew—both with regard to the occasional or isolated use of orphan works as well as mass digitization. These efforts reflect the influence of new technology and ongoing litigation, such as cases concerning Google Books and the HathiTrust, where mass digitization was found by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to constitute “fair use.”[7]
The growing reliance of many libraries and archives upon the principle of “fair use” as a justification for digitization has led USCO to consider whether this defense obviates the need for orphan works legislation. CAA has argued that this is not the case, recognizing that some uses of copyrighted material may not constitute “fair use.” Thus CAA continues to appreciate the value of such legislation to clarify the class known as “orphan works” to protect the needs of its membership, even as it advocates for the development of best practices guidelines for the fair use of copyrighted material.
CAA intends to submit comments related to the roundtable by USCO’s filing deadline of April 14th. Should any CAA members wish to offer thoughts related to this topic to be considered in relation to such a filing by CAA, please contact Executive Director Linda Downs (ldowns@collegeart.org) or President Anne Collins Goodyear (AGoodyear@bowdoin.edu) by April 7th.
Endnotes
[1] For more information on this event and other Notices of Inquiry by the US Copyright Office (USCO) on this topic, please see: http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/. Transcripts and video of the roundtables will be posted when they become available on the website of the USCO.
[2] CAA’s submission of these comments is described in CAA’s resources on “Intellectual Property and the Arts” which provides a link to these comments: http://www.collegeart.org/ip/orphanworks.
[3] For their generosity with their time and expertise, I thank Jeffrey P. Cunard, Christine L. Sundt, Judy Metro, Doralynn Pines, Eve Sinaiko, Linda Downs, and Betty Leigh Hutcheson. Chris Sundt and Jeff Cunard generously provided comments on earlier drafts of this posting, for which I am grateful. CAA’s long history of involvement with orphan works is detailed in CAA’s recent submission of comments, prepared by CAA counsel Jeffrey P. Cunard, on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization to USCO, in March 2013; please see: http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/comments/noi_11302012/College-Art-Association.pdf. http://www.collegeart.org/ip/orphanworks.
[4] Due to the strong outpouring of interest in the topic, participation by each organization had to be limited, and CAA prioritized these sessions.
[5] Further discussion of orphan works can be found on CAA’s website under “Intellectual Property and the Arts,” at http://www.collegeart.org/publications/ow.
[6] These challenges and the directive passed by the European Union are discussed in the February 10, 2014 USCO Notice of Inquiry for Orphan Works and Mass Digitization, available at http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/. See specifically the discussion of the topics raised by Session 4: “Types of Works Subject to Orphan Works Legislation, Including Issues Related Specifically to Photographs.”
[7] For more information on these decisions, including links to them, please see: See http://www.publicknowledge.org/files/google%20summary%20judgment%20final.pdf and Andrew Albanese, “Google Scanning is Fair Use Says Judge,” Publishers Weekly, October 11, 2012. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/54321-in-hathitrust-ruling-judge-says-google-scanning-is-fair-use.html. I thank Chris Sundt for recommending these resources.
Update on CAA’s Copyright and Fair-Use Project
posted by Christopher Howard — October 07, 2013
CAA has long been committed to enhancing understanding of copyright and fair-use issues in the field of the visual arts. Over the past year, it began a multiyear project looking toward the development of a code that reflects fair-use practices in the use of copyrighted materials in the field. The project’s methodology is based on the community-based and consensus-driven approach to developing codes of best practices in fair use that is described in Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (2011), which was authored by Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication at American University and director of its Center for Social Media, and Peter Jaszi, professor of law and faculty director of the Washington College of Law’s Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic.
To launch the project, Aufderheide and Jaszi, two of the principal investigators of the CAA project, began interviewing visual-arts professionals in October 2012, with the support of a start-up grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Last December, CAA was awarded a major grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund the project (see https://www.collegeart.org/news/2013/01/14/caa-receives-major-mellon-grant/).
Aufderheide and Jaszi have now completed one hundred interviews, including art historians, artists, museum professionals, archivists, art librarians, critics, designers, editors, publishers, and rights holders. These interviews have yielded rich data on the experiences and views of practitioners in the field.
To supplement these views, last March CAA circulated to members a survey questionnaire asking about their views on copyright and fair use. The survey results, along with research into legal issues and a literature review, have provided valuable information about copyright-related challenges facing the field.
Aufderheide and Jaszi are now drafting an Issues Report to summarize and analyze the information from the interviews, member survey, and literature review. Later this fall, the Issues Report will be reviewed by a number of groups, including the project’s principal investigators and advisors, the Task Force on Fair Use, and CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property (CIP). CAA also has assembled a Community Practices Advisory Committee (CPAC) to review the report in December. The CPAC members are:
- Maxwell Anderson, Director, Dallas Museum of Art
- Susan Bielstein, Executive Editor, University of Chicago Press
- Martha Buskirk, Professor of art history and criticism, Montserrat College
- Paul Catanese, Chair of Interdisciplinary Arts, Columbia College, and past-chair, CAA New Media Caucus
- Kenneth Hamma, Consulting at the Intersection of Cultural Heritage and IT
- Alan Newman, Chief, Digital Imaging and Visual Resources, National Gallery of Art
- Mari Carmen Ramirez, Curator of Latin American Art and Director, International Center for the Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Timothy Rub, Director, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and President, Association of Art Museum Directors
- Christine Sundt, Editor of Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation
After this review process is completed, the Issues Report will be presented to CAA’s Board of Directors and, after the board endorses it, it will then be published in advance of the Annual Conference. The report will be the subject of the CIP’s session at the conference, scheduled for NOON on Saturday, February 15.
Over the course of 2014, the Issues Report will be used in the project’s second phase—as the basis for discussions by small groups of visual-arts professionals around the country in meetings led by Aufderheide and Jaszi. Based on these discussions, CAA then hopes to draft a code of best practices that reflects a consensus of practitioners with respect to fair-use practices in scholarly publishing and in creating and curating artworks in the visual arts.
John Greyson Arrest in Egypt
posted by Linda Downs — August 27, 2013
The College Art Association joins colleagues around the world in expressing its hope for the swift release of John Greyson, Associate Professor at York University and Director of York’s graduate program in film, who was recently detained in Egypt, together with Tarek Loubani, a physician, while working on a film project. More information about John Greyson’s arrest has been provided by his home institution, York University: http://news.yorku.ca/2013/08/19/statement-from-york-university-president-and-vice-chancellor-mamdouh-shoukri-on-professor-john-greyson/.
Further information regarding the campaign to free John Greyson, can be found here:
http://www.podur.org/node/1019
Messages of support seeking his release can be directed to the following authorities:
Canadian Embassy in Egypt: cairo@dfait-maeci.gc.ca
Egyptian Embassy, Ottawa, Canada
Phone:
+1-613-234-4931
+1-613-234-4935
Email:
egyptemb@sympatico.ca
Egyptian Consulate General, Montreal, Canada
Phone:
+1-514-8668455
+1-514-8668456
+1-514-8668457
Email:
egypt.consulate@videotron.ca
John Baird – Minister of Foreign Affairs Canada
Phone
613-990-7720
Email
bairdj@parl.gc.ca
Twitter: John Baird @honjohnbaird
Twitter: Department of Foreign Affairs Canada: @DFATDCanada
Stephen Harper – Prime Minister of Canada
Phone [Ottawa office]
613-992-4211
Email
stephen.harper@parl.gc.ca
For the US:
Egyptian Embassy in the US: embassy@egyptembassy.net
Resale Royalty Agenda
posted by CAA — April 19, 2013
Anne Collins Goodyear, president of the CAA Board of Directors and associate curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, will represent CAA at the United States Copyright Office public roundtable on resale royalties for artists, to be held on April 23, 2013, in Washington, DC. Please download and review the agenda for the roundtable.
CAA Committee on Intellectual Property 2013 Annual Conference Session: Developing a Fair Use Code for the Visual Arts
posted by CAA — March 11, 2013
The CAA Committee on Intellectual Property sponsored a well-attended session at the 2013 Annual Conference, “Developing a Fair Use Code for the Visual Arts,” in support of CAA’s recently inaugurated fair-use project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with additional funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Chaired by Christine Sundt (also the Committee’s chair), this panel included the two principal investigators engaged by CAA to research, write, and disseminate a code of best practices in the use of third-party copyrighted material by practitioners across the arts. Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at the American University Washington College of Law, and Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication and co-director of its Center for Social Media, American University, were joined on the panel by Jeffrey Cunard, CAA Counsel and Partner, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP.
The discussion among panel members focused on the history of fair use and the background and schedule of CAA’s fair use project. The forthcoming code of best practices will assist individual scholars, artists, teachers, museum professionals, and other creators in analyzing what constitutes fair use of copyrighted works that they wish to employ. Answers to questions from the audience further delineated the scope of the project, which will address two types of users: scholars and museum professionals and those who use third party material in the making of art. The completed code will not constitute legal guidelines, but will document practice as it exists and will help the arts community understand the law regarding fair use. The code will provide a definition of a work of art as far-reaching and as including time-based and other multimedia forms.
Panelists for the session are also members of a Task Force on Fair Use, which oversees the project and is co-chaired by Cunard with Gretchen Wagner, former general counsel of ARTstor. Advisors on this project include Virginia Rutledge, art historian, and lawyer, and Maureen Whalen, associate general counsel for the J. Paul Getty Trust. The Committee on Intellectual Property will continue to support the project by hosting a session at the 2014 CAA Annual Conference on Jaszi and Aufderheide’s Issues Report, developed through interviews and focus groups, and a session to discuss the completed code at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York.
Additional work by the Committee on Intellectual Property included a restructuring of the Intellectual Property section of the CAA website, and presentation to and endorsement by the CAA Board of Directors of fair use guidelines written by the Association of Research Libraries and by the Visual Resources Association.
CAA’s Task Force on Fair Use Meets during Annual Conference
posted by Jeffrey Cunard, CAA Counsel — March 05, 2013
CAA is now moving ahead with its Fair Use project, which will culminate in developing and disseminating a code of best practices intended to guide visual arts scholars, artists, teachers and museum professionals when they may use the copyrighted works of others under fair use. The project is funded by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. An announcement of the grant can be found here: https://www.collegeart.org/news/2013/01/14/caa-receives-major-mellon-grant/
Last year, CAA’s Board established a Task Force to guide the Fair Use project. The Task Force is co-chaired by Gretchen Wagner, former general counsel of ARTstor, and me. Its other members include CAA President Anne Goodyear, CAA Executive Director Linda Downs, Committee on Intellectual Property Chair as well as members of the Board, and CAA members at large. During this year’s Annual Conference, the Task Force held its first meeting and the Committee on Intellectual Property sponsored a session that described the background of the project, its goals, and the projected timeline.
CAA’s Fair Use project has four phases. First, a hundred visual arts professionals, representing the broad spectrum of CAA’s membership and the field as a whole, will be interviewed on the use of third-party copyrighted materials in scholarly and artistic works. We also will survey CAA’s membership, so, within the next week, members can expect to see an email with a survey about copyright and the visual arts. Please take the time to fill it out: your participation is critical to the success of the project. This research phase will culminate in an Issues Report, which will be reviewed by a Community Practices Advisory Committee and, prior to the next Annual Conference, will then be made public.
In the second phase, we will convene a series of discussion groups across the country to focus on the issues raised by the Issues Report. These, too, will represent a wide range of CAA members. In these discussions, CAA members will discuss the most common situations identified in the Issues Report, and how they understand fair use to be important to accomplishing the professional goals of CAA members. During the third phase, that consensus will be reflected in a draft code. The draft will be reviewed by a Legal Advisory Committee, to ensure that it is consistent with the current law on fair use, and will be presented to the CAA Board for its approval. In the fourth and final phase, CAA will disseminate the code by making presentations at visual arts conferences around the country and posting webinars on CAA’s website and those of related organizations.
Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor in the School of Communication at American University and co-director of its Center for Social Media, and Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law and faculty director of the Washington College of Law’s Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic, co-principal investigators on the project, are conducting the research. They have considerable experience in developing codes of best practice for a large number of communities, including documentary filmmakers, dance archivists, poets, research librarians, and journalists. Their methodology and experience is described in their book, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, University of Chicago Press, 2011. We are also grateful for the expert input of project advisors Virginia Rutledge, an art advisor, art historian, and lawyer who practices in the areas of both copyright and art law, and Maureen Whalen, associate general counsel for the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Throughout CAA’s Fair Use project, we will post updates in CAA News. We hope you will follow our progress.
Please take time to complete the CAA Creativity and
Copyright Survey, arriving by email on Friday, March 8.
CAA Receives Major Mellon Grant
posted by Christopher Howard — January 14, 2013
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a major grant of $630,000 to develop, publish, and disseminate a code of best practices for fair use in the creation and curation of artworks and scholarly publishing in the visual arts. The initiative will examine the intersection of copyright understandings and creative practices of the visual arts community in art production, art scholarship, museum curation, and editing of work on art. The project will be completed over four years, from January 2013 through December 2016. During this period, CAA will produce an issues report documenting the effects of copyright understandings on creative choices and write a code of best practices in fair use for the communities of practice represented by its members.
In noting the importance of this work, Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA board president, observed: “The challenges and uncertainties faced by artists and art historians today in securing rights to reproduce works of art in hardcopy and electronically—and the difficulties in knowing when the law might require securing such rights—have serious adverse consequences for creative practice. Both scholarly and artistic projects are often compromised or even abandoned because of the arduous and expensive process of clearing permissions. An improved understanding of the scope of fair use and a field-wide agreement on its application will be invaluable to all practitioners in the visual arts.”
By undertaking this critical and timely project, CAA aims to provide much-needed clarification of best practices in the use of third-party copyrighted material, and establish a practicable code of conduct for members of the visual-arts community. In order to create a code that functions across all areas of the visual arts, CAA’s fair use project will involve participants from the fields of art history, studio art, print and online publishing, art museums, and related areas.
Linda Downs, executive director and CEO of the College Art Association emphasized the association’s capacity to lead this effort: “As the premier association in the visual arts, CAA is uniquely positioned to address these challenges. CAA’s membership represents a broad range of stakeholders—including artists, art historians, photographers, curators, writers, and educators, as well as museums, editors, and colleges and universities—who will benefit from the issues report and code of best practices. The organization has a strong record of advocacy on a variety of issues involving intellectual property. Moreover, as a scholarly publisher in the visual arts, CAA is familiar with the challenges associated with the uncertainty surrounding the application of fair use.”
The efforts funded by the Mellon grant will be overseen by a Task Force on Fair Use established by the CAA board in May of last year. The cochairs of the task force are: Jeffrey P. Cunard, long-standing CAA counsel and a managing partner in the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP; and Gretchen Wagner, a member of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property and general counsel of ARTstor. In addition to the cochairs, task force members include: Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA board president and associate curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Linda Downs, CAA executive director and chief executive officer; Randall C. Griffin, CAA vice president for publications and a professor in the department of art history at Southern Methodist University; and other CAA members with professional experience in studio art, art history, curatorial work, and copyright law.
CAA has engaged two principal investigators to lead the four-year project: Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication and co-director of its Center for Social Media; and Peter Jaszi, professor of law and faculty director of the Washington College of Law’s Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic. Aufderheide and Jaszi, who have significant expertise in successfully developing fair use codes for documentary filmmakers, dance archivists, research librarians, and journalists, will be responsible for conducting the investigatory work that will inform the report and code. Aufderheide and Jaszi will also work with a Community Practices Advisory Committee to review the report and a Legal Advisory Committee to review the code. Two project advisors—Virginia Rutledge, an art advisor, art historian, and lawyer who practices in the areas of both copyright and art law, and Maureen Whalen, associate general counsel for the J. Paul Getty Trust—will contribute expertise during all phases of the project. The task force cochairs, Cunard and Wagner, together with Goodyear, Downs, Aufderheide, and Jaszi will also serve as principal investigators.
CAA approaches this project with an established history of engagement on the issues of copyright and fair use, and gratefully acknowledges the work done in this area by allied scholarly societies including the Visual Resources Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the New York City Bar Association Art Law Committee (ALC). With the assistance of a start-up grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, awarded in September 2012, CAA recently completed a preparatory phase of the fair use project that will inform the activities now funded by the Mellon Foundation. During this preparatory phase, the task force met with Aufderheide, Jaszi, and CAA’s board of directors to discuss the research methodology and select thought leaders to be interviewed about copyright and fair use practices. Additionally, Aufderheide and Jaszi conducted twenty-five exploratory interviews with some of these thought leaders to help identify the key topics that the issues report and code should address. With this work completed, the task force and principal investigators are in a strong position to move forward with the formal investigative phase of the project.
For more information about the fair use project, please contact Janet Landay, project manager, at jlanday@collegeart.org (212-392-4420) or Virginia Reinhart, CAA marketing and communications associate, at vreinhart@collegeart.org (212-392-4426).