Copyright

We have received several questions about setting graduation ceremonies to music and streaming them or recording them and sharing them with students. What are the laws surrounding this? There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there. Below is a question I received:

The need to migrate ceremonies online has created a tsunami of copyright concerns.  What is a ceremony without the right music?  But this question pertains specifically to high school graduations for public schools, so we’ll confine it to those institutions.

We at [redacted higher ed institution] are considering digitizing our past yearbooks and storing them in an institutional repository which has the option of materials being password protected or available publicly. We are also considering using these photos in future advertising materials.

We have had a lot of questions about yearbooks over the years of Ask the Lawyer.[1]  We'll answer this submission with the understanding that for those who want further and deeper information, there's more to read in the "ATL" vault.

An academic librarian relayed this question from a researcher/author:

First, some validation: the faculty member is wise to be considering this issue, since publishing contracts[1] almost always put the responsibility and liability for photo clearances on the author.

The CASE Act has a provision for libraries to preemptively opt out of CCB proceedings. If we opt out at the institutional level, does that cover individual library employees?

Opting out seems like a good course of action for our institution but I wonder if there are reasons why we should not opt out.

For this question, "Ask the Lawyer" brought in "Authorlaw.com" and copyright attorney at the Law Office of Stephanie Adams, Sallie Randolph, as a guest author.  Many thanks to Sallie for crafting this answer as the CASE Act unfolds.

My institution subscribes to the "Kurzweil Reading Program", a "Text-to-Speech" product for those with reading impairments (dyslexia, English language learners, blind/vision impaired, etc.)

Section 121 indicates these users are "eligible persons" for "fair use", but others, without such disabilities could use the program (like an audiobook in the car!).

This question reflects the level of savvy "Ask the Lawyer" readers bring to their submissions.  The member submitting the question has already set out (in a manner much more succinct than I usually achieve) the interplay of:

Our historical society produced a documentary about the making of a sculpture. Our videographer filmed work in the sculptor’s studio and in so doing, in the background captured photographs the sculptor had on a storyboard for another project. Is it necessary to obtain permission to use the individual’s image, even though it was not prominent nor the subject of the documentary?

When people see a lawyer to complain about the misuse (or “misappropriation”) of their image, there are several legal theories that lawyer might assess the situation for, including:

If a teacher teaches a novel in school, can they show the DVD of the movie under fair use?

This question was submitted by a system serving elementary and secondary schools.

The answer for those schools (and for higher education, too) is: if the viewing of the DVD is tied to the reading of the book and the content is part of the class/curriculum, then YES, it can be viewed in class.

Is it legal for the library to purchase a Netflix account and install it on a Roku or Firestick and lend that out for patrons to use? See also: Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Disney+, Paramount+, etc. etc.

When this question came in, our first thought was that it was addressed in answers such as ATL 191 and ATL 104, and even older ATL 55, where we tackled the types of limits streaming services impose on accounts via contract. 

I am asking this on behalf of the Elementary School in my district. (I work in the library of our district's high school). The Elementary School participates every year in a program called PARP. (Parents As Reading Partners). The teachers and principal always make some sort of video to kick this off this event since pandemic times.

The short answer to this question is: IF the video is only going to include the YouTube animal clips, and IF it is only going to be used in the school for instructional purposes, the proposed use is fine, since copyright section 110(1)[1] allows schools to play videos in class if the topic is related to a class, and YouTube doesn't limit use of its s

The library's podcast (Your Friendly Neighborhood Librarians), hosted by two librarians here, recently started interviewing guests from outside the organization. We are concerned about a few things: what the ramifications are if a guest does not like the way their interview was edited and whether the library owns the rights to the interview and recording.

Some days, I just love my job.  The day I subscribed to "Your Friendly Neighborhood Librarians" (2/4/22) to answer this question was one of those days.