Ensuring the legalities of copyrighted material is essential for any graphic artist. Far too often web designers and other creative people use images without concern for who owns them. This also extends to usage of written material in articles taken off of websites for reproduction on other websites. Tad Crawford in Legal guide for the visual artist states with regard to copyright infringement that “An infringer can be sued for the artist's actual damages, plus any profits made by the infringer.” This point made by Crawford should warn creative people that there are specific legal consequences for using copyrighted material without proper consent of the copyright owner. In discussing who owns what material within court decisions author Elizabeth T. Russell in her book Art Law Conversations noted, “Originality is a statutory and constitutional prerequisite for copyright protection.” How this applies to our academic exercise is that we as researchers need to seek out the copyright owner of the original material we want to use from an existing website. This is important because the originality of works we use on our website is legally ensured to the person or company that originated the material. For this exercise we must first we must determine the name of the copyright owner of the material to ensure we seek them out for usage of their images and articles that were written on their website. The name of the copyright owner of American Baby Magazine is clearly stated on the bottom of their website as the Meredith Corporation which copyrighted the website in 2009. I found the name of the copyright owner at the very bottom of the first page of the American Baby Magazine website. The Copyright Clearance Center offers many different types of licenses for users of copyrighted material. I compared the differences between a pay-per use service license and an annual license. When one uses a pay-per use service license they are paying for permission to reuse copyrighted material. With the pay-per use service license you purchase these permissions with specific agreed upon types of reproduction of the copyrighted material you can then use to your own devices determined by the terms and conditions agreement. The cost of this type of agreement according to www.copyright.com is $3.00 per granted request and the cost of any royalty fees from the copyright holder. The annual copyright license on the other hand differs in that it takes away the need to obtain individual copyright permissions and gives you legal access to thousands of materials to share their copyrighted content. The American Baby magazine offers usage of their copyrighted material only after being granted permission to use on other Internet sites. This type of coverage is however not offered through Copyright Clearing Center for American Baby Magazine, while pay-per use service licenses are available. With these facts in place I would chose the pay-per use service license in that I only wish to purchase the rights to use one image from their website as well as an article for a limited amount of time on my own website for my client. As an alternative to purchasing the license I'd offer the owner of the copyright a written letter requesting permission to use their article and image by going to the Meredith.com website directly. They may be kind in offering free usage of their copyrighted material through my written appeal for one. In the video I watched, Harry Ellis discusses issues arising from being both an IT manager as well as a project manager. He talked in detail about the ethical and moral obligations when approached by a client that wants to produce a questionable website of ill moral content. Ellis when put in this position first discusses with his designers if they initially even want to produce the website for the client, to ensure that everyone involved is informed as to what the project would entail. As a project manager Ellis gives designers the right to refuse assignments based on their own objections to the moral concerns of the content the client wants to create. This moral and ethical issue is important to raise, because aside from copyright law we have to consider if what our client is asking us to undertake is in line with our own value system as both designers and human beings. This isn't the case in our exercise involving the American Baby Magazine article and image, in that it does not morally or ethically impose on us as designers, it is more of a legal issue in protecting the copyright owners rights in reproduction of the materials sought out. Overall, copyrighted material must be researched thoroughly, with financial and ethical considerations being of utmost importance. We must protect copyright owners rights, as well as our own in this ever-changing legal realm of responsibility and accountability. After this thorough research and cost assessment we can then get to the fun part of designing a great website for our client, with all legal considerations taken into effect. BM
