At 07:18 PM 7/27/98 -0800, Suz wrote: >Regardless of how Tamra feels, US Copyright Law states otherwise: unless >created by an employee of a company or under a work for hire agreement, the >artist owns the graphics. Opps! I didn't mean to make that sound as though I don't believe in the copyright laws! As a writer, I really truly do. However, unlike Suzanne, a lot of my projects involve taking images that have already been created for the client and making them web-ready. Otter Tail Power Company is a good example. The navigation graphics were created as all originals by us, for the web site. Dianna, the graphic artist I hired to make those nice nav devices, has the copyright on those images (I didn't make her sign a work-for-hire, and the contract with OTPCO said nothing about copyrights). But there are about a hundred other images on the site, including drawings of elements of a power plant, that were all from their print materials. Do I own the copyright on those just because I scanned them in or resized someone else's TIFF? No way -- even when I add drop shadows, or fancy edging, the *image* still belongs to the copyright holder. My alterations don't make me the copyright holder, just the production artist. Whoever made those original images is the copyright holder. A lot of folks get very confused about this -- they think that if they take a copyrighted image (say Snoopy) and make a few changes that they become the copyright holder. Not true! A sad real world fact is that clients don't understand this copyright stuff. In fact, they don't want to understand it -- because most of them feel that if they pay for something, it's theirs. I've lost track of the number of blank looks I've gotten when I've asked potential clients if they have "all rights/web rights" to the pile of photos and drawings they want me to scan in. (My favorite is the client with PowerPoint mockups of their pages who can't understand why I can't just use the images from PowerPoint on their web site....) A lot of these same owners have gone on and used screen shots or portions of images from the web sites on some print material -- and if I said "oh, you can't do that, you don't have rights" would I get any more work from them? Not in this lifetime. So, for those clients (and I can usually tell who they are in the first meeting) I don't bother trying to keep copyright of anything, I just make sure the contact gives me permission to use "their" design in my portfolio. (And yes, I have had one client who wanted me to check with them and get permission before showing any examples/printouts of their site to *anyone* -- do you think they thought I had the copyright? No way!) I fight as hard as I can for copyrights -- a chunk of my $$s is supporting the National Writers Union's battles on this subject -- but sometimes the need to get paid is a bigger necessity. If I didn't acknowledge that most of my clients are brain dead when it comes to understanding copyrights -- and if I didn't let them "win" sometimes -- I'd probably be out of business by now. BTW, I think copyrights are the biggest issue of the 90's, and that the anyone interested in copyrights should be paying close attention to UCC 2B because it could wipe out a lot of creator's rights. Tech writers especially -- there's a clause that makes technical and corporate writers accountable for the accuracy and fitness of the info supplied by the client! It's just a small step from there to making all of us responsible for all the info on a web site -- and for making us responsible for any copyright violations (i.e. when a client claims they have rights and gives you an image and they don't and get sued). I don't have any online references to UCC 2B -- I got my info from the summer print issue of the American Writer -- but those of you interested can search for it and find stuff I'm sure. --Tamra Heathershaw-Hart ----------------------------------------------------- Hart Consulting Web Studio http://www.hartcons.com/ Web Site Design, Production, Programming, & Promotion 650-967-6162 (phone) 1-800-749-8032 (fax) ----------------------------------------------------- ____________________________________________________________________ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done directly from our website for all our lists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------
