Copyright - Seeking Permission
If after reading the copyright law, you are still unsure about your compliance, it is always a good idea to contact the publisher or author of the work you are seeking to duplicate, distribute or use.
Where to get permission*:
To obtain permission to use a print or electronic journal contact:
Journal Publisher (Instructions to Authors)
Users may contact the journal publisher directly to seek permission to use an article, issue or volume of a specific electronic or print journal. This website was created by The Medical College of Ohio Medical Library. It contains links to the websites which provide instructions to authors for over 3,500 journals in the health and life sciences. Contact information for the publisher should be on this page.
Copyright Clearance Center:
"Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., the largest licenser of text reproduction rights in the world, was formed in 1978 to facilitate compliance with U.S. copyright law. CCC provides licensing systems for the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted materials in print and electronic formats throughout the world.
The company currently manages rights relating to over 1.75 million works and represents more than 9,600 publishers and hundreds of thousands of authors and other creators, directly or through their representatives. CCC-licensed customers in the U.S. number over 10,000 corporations and subsidiaries (including 92 of the Fortune 100 companies), as well as thousands of government agencies, law firms, document suppliers, libraries, academic institutions, copy shops and bookstore
Print/Electronic Books
To obtain permission to use a print or electronic book, you may contact the publisher or the vendor of the electronic product.
Film Clips/Video
To obtain permission to use film clips, contact the appropriate Movie Studio. or Production Companies.
Photographs
To obtain permission to use a photograph, contact the photographer responsible for the photo or try a Stock Photography company.
Music
To obtain permission to perform a piece of music contact...
ASCAP
From the ASCAP Website: "ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) is a membership association of over 145,000 composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers of every kind of music and hundreds of thousands worldwide. ASCAP is the only U.S. performing rights organization created and controlled by composers, songwriters and music publishers, with a Board of Directors elected by and from the membership.
ASCAP protects the rights of its members by licensing and distributing royalties for the non-dramatic public performances of their copyrighted works. ASCAP's licensees encompass all who want to perform copyrighted music publicly. ASCAP makes giving and obtaining permission to perform music simple for both creators and users of music."
or
BMI
From the BMI Website: "BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.) is an American performing rights organization that represents approximately 300,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers in all genres of music. The non-profit-making company, founded in 1940, collects license fees on behalf of those American creators it represents, as well as thousands of creators from around the world who chose BMI for representation in the United States. The license fees BMI collects for the "public performances" of its repertoire of approximately 4.5 million compositions - including radio airplay, broadcast and cable television carriage, Internet and live and recorded performances by all other users of music - are then distributed as royalties to the writers, composers and copyright holders it represents."
To obtain permissions to use a sound effect contact The Canary Collection Production Music Library. Canary is a buy-out production music library holding the copyrights for various television and radio music and lyric jingles. By joining the buy-out library, users entitle themselves to use any of the contents of the library without worry of copyright infringement.
To obtain permission to use material from the Internet, contact the page author. If no author is clearly visible, select View and Source from that menu. This allows you to view the page source. Typically in the top section of the code, there is a META tag for page author that contains usually a name and sometimes an email address.
To obtain permission to use a database, CD-ROM product or portions there of, contact the publisher of the product or the vendor.
Back to the main copyright page.
*Some of the information on this and other pages was taken from the workshop "Copyright in the Digital Age" presented by Laura Gassaway, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in February 2003.