Regarding Lori Ann Mott's request for information on use fees, a number
of curators in Arizona have been informally discussing this issue--
specifically in the context of agencies wanting to come in a digitize
large numbers of images.
 
The consensus of the group is: 1) use fees should be based on the
size of the publication relative to its format, with lower fees for
small publications (say local distribution/market). 2) CD-ROM is really
no different from other uses of images; although these agencies may
want a discount because of the number of images they are requesting,
they're really no different from paper publications.  Time-Life (for
example) has run into the economic reality of use fees, and has limited
the number of illustrations in their works; don't tell me they wouldn't
like to use just as many photos in their books, but run into a
budgetary wall.  Many public repositories in Arizona do offer a sliding
scale on use fees (6-10, 5% off; 11-15, 10% off; 21+, 20% off), but we
offer the same deal to CD-ROM folk as we do paper publishers.
 
3) Concerns over piracy.  Oh, puleez.  I just got a phone call from a
major broadcasting company who was actually being very cautious about
copyright; but then they were going to save money on copy photos by
copying the works out of a book.  We're releasing images in non-digital
formats that can be bootlegged easily.
 
4) Rights.  Most repositories I know of charge a fee for one-time, one-
edition rights.  They don't consider the geographical coverage of the rights
(North American, world, etc.).  But, they don consider different languages
to be different editions.  One-time won't work for most television/film
permissions, as each showing (rebroadcast) would require a separate
agreement; I am currently doubling my one-time fee in these instances.
A CD-ROM product would be just like a book; it might be "read" many
different times by many differnt people, but it's fundamentally a single
edition issued once.  (You might consider charging by the equivalent of
a press run, but that could automatically be covered under distribution
size; if they pay for distribution of x copies and wind up selling x+1
they have to pay an additional fee.)
 
I recently had to write an agreement that tried to define a television
program and its future uses.  I agreed that as long as the intellectual
content was not changed, multiple formats would be considered a single
use (i.e., VHS, Beta, Laserdisk were all considered fundamentally the
same edition).  I also allow any use of that edition (broadcast, rebroadcast,
home video market, ships at sea, etc.) to be covered under the More Than
Once clause, though that might have been overly generous of me.
 
So there's my two cents.  If anyone wants a copy of the several pages of
minutes I took at the meeting, send me an e-mail note.
 
*** In my work with this group, I would like to obtain from folk such as
you stock "legalize" that you use in your agreements.  I'd really
appreciate electronic text e-mailed to me (which I'll summarize to the
list).  To try to narrow this down a bit, I'm specifically looking for
wording that you've developed to define slippery problems: how do you
define scholarly use, do you have wording regarding alteration of images
or misrepresentation of content/historical accuracy.
 
Thanks.
 
Richard Pearce-Moses,
  Curator of Photographs, Arizona State University Libraries, Tempe 85287-1006
  [log in to unmask]  (Internet)  IACRPM@ASUACAD (Bitnet)