Conference Agenda
| Session | ||
Don't Wake the Balrog! Navigating Copyright Issues in Publication
Session Topics: Alternative: 180 minutes session length, SMT
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| Presentations | ||
Don't Wake the Balrog! Navigating Copyright Issues in Publication This session aims to support music scholars who want to publish their work, by providing information that can help them navigate copyright issues. Most music scholarship incorporates copyrighted material at some point. While there are statutory protections for using copyrighted material in teaching and conference talks, scholarship that gets published is a different story. Currently, most publishers place the burden of copyright compliance on authors. But securing copyright permissions is often confusing, time-intensive, and costly. And how much reproduction—or transformation of a copyrighted work—avoids infringement is under-discussed. By combining lightning talks, a panel discussion with diverse and multi-disciplinary professionals, and open discussion with attendees, this session will not only provide information regarding the state of the law, but also information in the form of personal experiences from scholars, editors, and legal and research experts who have navigated these challenges before. While the risk of litigation always exists and can linger long after something is published, this session hopes to empower more scholars to make better-informed decisions by knowing with greater confidence how work samples in their scholarship can interact with copyright protections in the US and beyond. Presentations of the Symposium Introduction to US and European Copyright Laws' Roles in Academic Music Publications This talk will overview the ways that music scholarship intersects with copyright law. In the United States, authors must work within a system of "fair use" and some limited exceptions for academic work to determine permissible uses of copyrighted material. In Europe, authors instead work within the concept of "fair dealing" (UK) or from a list of explicit copyright exceptions (EU). After providing an overview of these systems, I survey relevant caselaw and explain how the current legal landscape may depart from norms of musical practice. Finally, I offer strategies to navigate copyright issues in scholarly publications, including framing copyrighted materials, transforming musical examples, and engaging in self-advocacy. The role of libraries and librarians This talk will focus on the library side of the research process, highlighting how to obtain permissions, some copyright resources, and how your librarian can be your biggest asset when approaching a complicated research question. Transforming video examples This talk will survey, and generalize, different approaches that music theorists have taken to transform video examples to make them accord with the fair use clause in their publications Asian languages and copyright research This talk will highlight language-related challenges when working with non-English and non-Western popular song. Most databases used in American copyright research contain data only in the English alphabet. This can lead to errors and discrepancies in how rights owners’ names are recorded, which complicates doing rights searches by name. Creating an open educational resource Multimodal Musicianship is an open educational resource that contains text, score and audio examples, video content, interactive activities, and supplemental materials for teaching and learning music theory and ear training. This talk shows the evaluation process for the musical examples that appear in Multimodal Musicianship, and for copyrighted material, it offers a system for evaluating them according to the four principles of fair use (purpose, nature, amount, effect). | ||