[KineJapan] stills

[Earl Jackson]

Dear Everyone,
I can't be terribly specific here, so forgive the vagueness, but I would
like advice on the question of stills and fair use. I have a piece coming
out in the issue of a certain journal. The editorial staff have been
extemely diligent in working with an agent to ask Shochiku, Kadokawa, and
Toho for permissions. The former two have been even worse than expected,
but we deferred to them and are completely legally in line. After months
and repeated attempts to have Toho respond, they never did. Now one of the
images I want to use is not even a complete still, it is a detail, an
excerpt of a still that is about 1/3 of the still and has no faces in it.
The film is 59 years old and never released on DVD. The image is virtually
a design. But this has made me seem difficult. At the moment I was offered
to be allowed to use it if I sign a letter of indemnity. My position is
that we made every good faith effort to ask to Toho and they chose not to
do so. The journal editor fears that since we used the agent for shochiku
she has to examine the published version to make sure we complied and did
not use any shochiku images we didn't pay for (we won't) - but in doing
that she might see the partial image from Toho and report us. I don't want
to cause the journal problems but I can't help being exasperated.
Any advice would be welcome, even if it is only encouraging me to give it
up.
Thank you
earl
Earl Jackson
Chair Professor
Foreign Languages and Literatures
Asia University
Professor Emeritus
National Chiao Tung University
Associate Professor Emeritus
University of California, Santa Cruz
Co-Director
Trans-Asia Screen Cultures Institute
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20190831/213126b7/attachment.html>