Resources for Copyright in Art

College Art Association

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts

"This code is based on a consensus of professionals in the visual arts who use copyrighted images, texts and other materials in their creative and scholarly work and who, through discussion groups, identified best practices for using such materials. They included art and architectural historians, artists, designers, curators, museum directors, educators, rights and reproduction officers, and editors at scholarly publishers and journals." DeWitt Godfrey, Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts

Read: Code of Best Practices

Watch: YouTube

Visual Resources Association
The International Association Of Image Media Professionals

Intellectual Property Rights (PR) and Copyright: Resources Providing Guidance on Academic Use of Images

"This Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study describes six uses of copyrighted still images that the Visual Resources Association (vraweb.org) believes fall within the U.S. doctrine of fair use. The six uses are: 1) preservation (storing images for repeated use in a teaching context and transferring images to new formats); 2) use of images for teaching purposes; 3) use of images (both large, high-resolution images and thumbnails) on course websites and in other online study materials; 4) adaptations of images for teaching and classroom work by students; 5) sharing images among educational and cultural institutions to facilitate teaching and study; and 6) reproduction of images in theses and dissertations."

Read: Intellectual Property Rights (PR) and Copyright: Resources Providing Guidance on Academic Use of Images

Rights and Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions, Second Edition (2018)

Edited by Anne M. Young

Fair Use in the Visual Arts: Lesson Plans for Librarians (2015)

Edited by Alexander Watkins, Bridget Madden, Alexandra Provo, Danielle Reay, and Anna Simon

Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property (2006)

By Susan M. Bielstein

Using Images, Boston University LibGuide (Last updated June 2021)

By Ruth Thomas

Compendium: Visual Art Works: Chapter 900 (2021)

By the U.S. Copyright Office

Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Society for Cinema Studies, “Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills” (n.d)