Collective Rights Organizations | Contacting the Owner
Changed Owner | Authority | In Writing
Difficulty Identifying Owner | Unidentifiable/Unresponsive Owner

Collective Rights Organizations

Copyright Clearance Center

If the work is part of a book or a journal article, contact the Copyright Clearance Center ("CCC") first. The CCC offers an electronic permission service and a well-established photocopy based academic permission service. If the work you want to use is registered with the CCC, you can get permission within 24 to 36 hours. Permission during peak times like the beginning of fall semester will take longer.

Image Archives

At this time, the professional organizations representing image creators cater to commercial interests and may be unfamiliar with educational needs. Until organizations catering more precisely to our needs emerge, these are a sampling of your options.

Freelance Writers

If the author has retained copyright in a contribution to a periodical such as a magazine or newspaper, permission may be obtained through Ingenta, which handles rights for the Publication Rights Clearinghouse, a collective-licensing agency representing such writers' groups as The National Writers Union (NWU), the Canadian Science Writers' Association (CSWA), the Periodical Writers Association of Canada, the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, and the United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics, among others.

Music Performance

Music Research Consultants' web page contains links to publishers, record labels, music rights agencies, and more. This is a good place to gather contact information. If you know the name of an artist, album, song or label, the All-Music Guide allows you to search for more information and often links directly to the source.

Play Rights

News Archives

If the work you need to use is from a newspaper or other news organization, check the World Wide Web. Many of the largest news organizations have placed archives of their back issues online.

Movies

The Motion Picture Licensing Corporation grants public performance rights.

Contacting the Owner

If you know who the author and the publisher are, you can contact them directly. If you do not know who the publisher is, The Literary Marketplace (for books) or Ulrich's International Periodicals (for journals), both published by the R. R. Bowker Company, may help you. Project Acorn provides extremely helpful information about how to find copyright owners as does U.T. Austin's Library Online. If you visit these sites, spend some time there exploring all the information they have provided about the whole process of getting permission.

Once you know whom to ask, writing a letter, calling or emailing are all appropriate ways to initiate contact.

Changed Owner

Sometimes the apparent copyright owner is no longer the real copyright owner. The Copyright Office now provides online searching of some of its registration records and performs professional searches for a fee.

Confirming Authority to Grant Permission

Whenever it is unclear who the owner is, or if the owner is a legal entity of some kind (a business or organization), you should be sure that the person giving you permission is authorized to do so. For example, if you are negotiating with an author, question her about whether she retained copyright or whether she assigned it to her publisher. Sometimes people are unsure. If you are preparing a commercial product, you will need absolute assurances of authority to grant permission because your publisher will expect those assurances from you.

Written Permission

Ideally, your permission should be in writing and should clearly describe the scope of permission. Vaguely worded permissions may not cover your intended use. Be careful here: describe what you want to do precisely and include alternatives if you are unsure of format. For example, if you are preparing a Web-based multimedia product, you may wish to distribute it on a CD-ROM under some circumstances.

Permission does not have to be in writing. If you receive oral permission, precisely describe what you want to do, and then document the conversation carefully. It wouldn't hurt to send a confirming letter to the owner, asking him or her to initial it and return it to you if it accurately reflects your agreement.

Difficulty Identifying Owner

If the author, creator or publisher is not obvious, such as may be the case for historical photographs, architectural drawings, personal papers or other archival materials, your task may be more difficult. Try the following:
 

Unidentifiable/Unresponsive Owner

Sometimes, even if you go through all the right steps, you may not figure out whom to ask or the owner may not respond. There truly may be no one who cares about what you do with a particular work, but the bottom line is that no amount of unsuccessful effort eliminates liability for copyright infringement. Copyright protects materials whether the owner cares about protection or not.

(This webpage is modeled after The Copyright Crash Course developed by Georgia Harper, Office of General Counsel, University of Texas System. Permission to model after the site was granted by Ms. Harper.  http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/cprtindex.htm)