subject to technological protective measures that prevent it from being used for the section 110(2) exemption.[1]
This is only a taste of the TEACH Act. Many universities have helpful information on their Web sites to help you apply the TEACH Act.[2]
Image Collections
Academic and special libraries often maintain collections of images on slides. Some are purchased, while others were reproduced from photographs or books of photographs. Two questions come to mind. First, may a library copy images from a published source? Second, may a library digitize images from its physical collection?
Because photographs are subject to copyright protection, an educator or librarian needs permission to copy protected images unless the copying is a fair use or otherwise allowed under the Copyright Act. An important exception, however, are non-creative photographs of works in the public domain, which are not copyrightable because they lack originality. We discussed this in Chapter One. You need not seek permission nor pay royalties to copy those works.
A compilation of images also may be copyrighted as a collective work. When this is the case, copying dozens of images from, say, a coffee table book of rock ‘n’ roll posters also may require permission from whoever has copyright in the compilation. This is true even when the original work is not protected. For example, copying numerous photos from a book that reproduces nineteenth-century artwork may violate copyright in the collective work, even though both the original paintings and the photographs of those paintings are in the public domain.
What about a library or archive’s slide collections? To suggest that they must destroy their collections of copied slides would be presumptuous. Such collections have been common practice in libraries and archives for decades. Having a slide collection is different from digitizing them.
- ↑ 17 U.S.C. § 112(f)(2) (2006).
- ↑ See, for example, pages from Columbia University (http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/special-topics/distance-education/), the University of Minnesota (http://www.lib.umn.edu/copyright/teaching), and North Carolina State University (http://www.provost.nesu.edu/copyright/toolkit/).
