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• Rights Status and Obtaining Permissions

NJVID - Determining the Rights Status and Obtaining Permissions

Traditionally, copyright has been one of the thorniest issues impeding online access to moving image collections. Simply put, caretakers often do not know who owns the rights to videos in their collections. This section gives steps for determining who owns which rights to what videos, how to go about securing rights, and how to prevent rights ambiguities from recurring.

• Determine the Rights Status

  You might not know if your institution has the legal authority to contribute videos to NJVid. If so, you can use our Rights Decision Tree to make a clear determination. Beginning with the upper leftmost rectangle, consider the question raised and, based on your response, follow the diagram to the appropriate connecting rectangle. Repeat the process until you have reached one of the two terminal hexagons. It will indicate what your next course of action should be. In the event that you need to obtain and manage permissions to your videos, follow the steps below in sequence. Otherwise, you have obtained all necessary rights via signed licenses or deeds of gift and can jump to the section below on Video Delivery.

• Obtain Permissions from Right Holders

  As stipulated by copyright law, generally speaking, before you can present or distribute your videos, you need to obtain permission to do so from the primary individual or group of individuals who contributed intellectual property to the videos. The author(s) or creator(s) of the videos hold or share copyright. Examples include guest speakers, performers and videographers. Your videos might have related or underlying rights as well. You must obtain signed licenses from both groups of rights holders.

  • If your institution does not have one of its own, you can customize our Sample Nonexclusive License and use it to obtain permission from copyright holders to use a video “by any digital means,” including NJVid. The reason we recommend that you obtain signed licenses to videos with this verbiage rather than NJVid-specific language, and the reason we recommend that you customize the sample license with your institution’s branding rather than NJVid’s, is that it will allow you to use your video in multiple digital projects rather than exclusively in NJVid.
  • In addition to the main copyright holder(s), individuals or groups might also have underlying or related rights to a video. Please refer to our document on Related Rights Guidance for thorough coverage of this topic. As with copyright holders, please be sure to obtain a license from each related or underlying rights holder before contributing to NJVid.
  • Presently or in the future, when acquiring ownership of a physical video or film from a copyright holder, you may use our Sample Deed of Gift to obtain permission from the donor to reformat the video or film, including reformatting to digital formats for use by any digital means, such as with NJVid. As with a license, a deed of gift is a legal agreement or contract between your institution and an individual, group or organization (a rights holder, in the case of a license, and an owner of physical property, in the case of a deed of gift), not NJVid. For this reason, we recommend that you customize and use our sample deed of gift if your institution does not have a suitable one of its own. If your institution acquires a video from a donor who is not its sole copyright holder, you will still need to acquire a separate license from the video’s rights holder(s) before you will be able to contribute the video to NJVid.

  If your institution obtained a deed of gift to a video from its sole rights holder, you must check to see if the deed includes permission for your institution to digitally transfer, present and archive the video. Lacking permission that encompasses reformatting, digital presentation and digital archiving, we recommend that you ask the donor to sign a license giving permission to use the video “by any digital means.”

• For more information about deeds of gift, consult the Society of American Archivists Web site: www.archivists.org