[Nhcoll-l] photography policy

[Dean Pentcheff]

As pointed out by Dirk Neumann, be sure that you (collectively) are certain
about who holds copyright on the images based on how you will gather them.
Under U.S. copyright law, if a work is created by an employee as part of
his or her job, the copyright belongs to the employer. This is an exception
to the general rule that copyright belongs to the person creating the work.
Of course, an employer may chose to explicitly agree to a different
disposition, and the situation with external consultants has to be
negotiated explicitly.

When negotiating with external consultants, try to make sure that you get
blanket and perpetual usage rights for all possible uses of the images. We
(NHM) have been caught on that one many times, where we hired a
photographer to shoot images for (let's say) a brochure, then realized that
we didn't have rights to use the image on a web page. Time to reshoot...

Also, as pointed out by Katie Connolly, consider using Creative Commons
licensing. You retain copyright, but licence the use of the work in a way
that permits others to use it with certain restrictions. CC is handy
(rather than making up your own restrictions), since people already have an
idea of what those are and where to find out about them.

When doing so, however, please consider using the widest possible licence
you can. It's very tempting to pick one of the more restrictive CC
licenses, like Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. There's a perception
that one is fencing off profiteers from making megabucks from your hard
work.

Doing so pretty much ensures that either: (a) anyone really using the
images would have to negotiate further with you; or (b) people will just
look at the license, snort, and go right ahead. Really — if there is easy
money to be made from images of your specimens, aren't you going to go
ahead and make the money yourselves first?

Think about why you are likely to make the images available. In our case we
realized it was almost always to propagate information about natural
history, and to establish us (NHM) as a trustworthy source for images. We
realized (in our group, at least — I do not speak for the institution as a
whole!) that "CC BY" was the right licence: go ahead and use the image as
long as you credit us. That lets other people conveniently use and
repurpose our work while helping us achieve the goal we seek — increased
public knowledge.

All that said: no, we don't have a guiding document :)

-Dean
-- 
Dean Pentcheff
pentcheff at gmail.com
dpentche at nhm.org

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Katie Connolly <katie at cablemuseum.org>
wrote:
>
> Hello! We are in the process of drafting a photograph policy as it
> pertains to our collections. We have living and non-living collections, and
> often get requests to photograph animals, specimens, objects, etc. Does
> anyone out there have a good policy or document that we might look at for
> ideas and guidance as we draft our own?
>
>
>
> Feel free to message me personally.
>
>
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
>
>
> *Katie Connolly*
>
>
>
> Museum Naturalist/Curator
>
> Cable Natural History Museum
>
> PO Box 416
>
> Cable, WI 54821
>
> P: 715-798-3890 x113
>
> F: 715-798-3828
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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