MLA and open-source freeware

[Razanir]

The Playground seems to be a fairly smart and well-rounded forum, so I'll ask this here.

I generated pictures for an English paper using an open-source, public domain PHP script. (iCube, if anyone's wondering) I didn't bother to cite the images because, you know, the page I got it from labelled the script as public domain. But when I got it back, my professor said that I actually needed to cite the images. If anyone's familiar with MLA citations, did I actually need to have cited them and if so, how?

[SaintRidley]

You're still expected to cite things, even if they're public domain. Public domain doesn't mean you can just slap it in a paper without attribution.

For example, a certain comic book may have lapsed into public domain. If I'm doing a paper on that comic, I can use images from the comic to lend a visual aid. I still have to cite it, though. A different comic, say one of the early Wonder Woman strips, is not public domain, which means I have to acquire the permission to use the image from DC Comics. I still have to cite it.

Comics criticism runs into all kinds of problems due to copyright law. Old Disney comics, for example, are almost never studied (and when they are, there are no visual aids), because Disney sees any reproduction of those works as a violation of copyright and refuses to grant permission, even for an academic purpose.

Fortunately, if I'm writing about Order of the Stick, there are enough comics available online that I can provide the URL to a visual aid rather than reproducing the comic in my paper. Still have to credit Rich, though. His comic being freely available does not permit me to just lift and use without attribution.



As for specifics of citing, was the image from a book you got via iCube? If so, cite the book as normal and include a Figure legend beneath the picture. I.e., "Fig. 1. [comment about the picture as relates to your argument] Reproduced from [book title], page [number]" and cite the source as normal in your works cited page.

[Anarion]

Comics criticism runs into all kinds of problems due to copyright law. Old Disney comics, for example, are almost never studied (and when they are, there are no visual aids), because Disney sees any reproduction of those works as a violation of copyright and refuses to grant permission, even for an academic purpose.


I call BS. You have to cite stuff because schools kick people out for committing plagiarism. Disney has no power to stop someone using their images for an academic paper. It's probably the single clearest example of fair use. If people aren't studying them, it's because they're hard to find or otherwise annoying for some reason.

[Kneenibble]

I call BS. You have to cite stuff because schools kick people out for committing plagiarism. Disney has no power to stop someone using their images for an academic paper. It's probably the single clearest example of fair use. If people aren't studying them, it's because they're hard to find or otherwise annoying for some reason.

I believe she is referring to published academic work, not undergrad papers.

[Razanir]

My issue is this:

The way I see it, using open-source public domain software to generate pictures is no different from using a camera to take pictures yourself. So the way I see it, the real question is if you need to cite pictures you take yourself

[Anarion]

I believe she is referring to published academic work, not undergrad papers.

That isn't relevant for the fair use exception. You can publish in an academic journal or a scholarly book and use people's stuff if it's necessary for the research that you're doing on their stuff. You can't use Disney pictures if you're studying some other random topic, but you can 100%* cite Disney pictures in any academic work that's studying those Disney pictures.




*99%. There's an off chance that somebody could claim you were doing the whole thing as a ruse just to use Disney's work. But that would be stupid unless you were actually doing it as a ruse.


My issue is this:

The way I see it, using open-source public domain software to generate pictures is no different from using a camera to take pictures yourself. So the way I see it, the real question is if you need to cite pictures you take yourself

Actually, yes, you probably should caption the pictures and say you made them yourself. It's not at all clear, and the default assumption with pictures is usually that someone else made them, given the ease of Googling stuff. If you want, you can do a single footnote on the opening page of the paper that simply notes that you made all the pictures using your freeware program.

[SaintRidley]

I call BS. You have to cite stuff because schools kick people out for committing plagiarism. Disney has no power to stop someone using their images for an academic paper. It's probably the single clearest example of fair use. If people aren't studying them, it's because they're hard to find or otherwise annoying for some reason.

As kneenibble said, I'm specifically referring in that section to published academic work. Academics aren't studying Disney comics because they'll be threatened with lawsuits, fair use or no, because Disney is over the top in its efforts to be seen as vigorously defending its copyright. Marvel, though now Disney owned, is much easier to deal with. Though there are numerous other reasons why superhero comics have not received the same sort of critical attention as comics like, say, Maus or Fun Home. Again, though, with comics that are corporate-owned, there's a good bit of keeping on one's toes with regard to permissions in comics studies.

[Kneenibble]

That isn't relevant for the fair use exception. You can publish in an academic journal or a scholarly book and use people's stuff if it's necessary for the research that you're doing on their stuff. You can't use Disney pictures if you're studying some other random topic, but you can 100%* cite Disney pictures in any academic work that's studying those Disney pictures.

As an archivist whose profession requires more than a passing knowledge of copyright law, I can tell you that it is not that simple.

[Anarion]

As kneenibble said, I'm specifically referring in that section to published academic work. Academics aren't studying Disney comics because they'll be threatened with lawsuits, fair use or no, because Disney is over the top in its efforts to be seen as vigorously defending its copyright. Marvel, though now Disney owned, is much easier to deal with. Though there are numerous other reasons why superhero comics have not received the same sort of critical attention as comics like, say, Maus or Fun Home. Again, though, with comics that are corporate-owned, there's a good bit of keeping on one's toes with regard to permissions in comics studies.

This isn't true. I can personally tell you that I'm an academic and I wrote a study on a comic featuring Mickey Mouse that's being used and published via the Internet for the course I TA and my professor was like "yeah, if they sue us, we can use it as a teaching experience, go for it!"

I'm sure that if we survey every academic in every college in the U.S., pure statistics will find someone that's worried about being sued by Disney, but you're not correct about how they're used in academic articles. Disney has been the frequent subject of copyright law academics and people use their stuff all the time in published journals.

If people aren't studying their old comics, it's got very little to do with being worried about a Disney lawsuit.

Edit:

As an archivist whose profession requires more than a passing knowledge of copyright law, I can tell you that it is not that simple.

You're going to need to explain. PM me if you're worried we're getting into too specific legal advice here. You're pulling rank on me here, but I teach copyright law at Harvard Law school, so when I say that an academic paper studying Disney images can use Disney images, you're either going to have to take my word for it or I can PM you a bunch of case citations.

Having said that, I will concede that if someone specifically went out of their way to piss off Disney, Disney certainly has the resources to make a lawsuit unpleasant.

[Grinner]

U.S. copyright law is pointlessly byzantine, utterly useless, and, when it comes down to anything valuable, a huge joke. :smallsigh: (Edit: What else do you expect from a bunch of clueless seventy year-old Senators?)

Just cite yourself as the artist, saying something to the effect of "by Razanir, using iCube <url>", and be done with it.

[SaintRidley]

Maybe the professor I have (not a law professor, but a professor of film and comics studies) is just a fuddy duddy and overly cautious (he's also more interested in studying early romance comics, so he may not be as aware of the Disney studies and therefore not passing that information along). If you're right on the articles, then I'm going to guess he's either unaware or referring to book-length studies of Disney comics. Do you know of any?


It might be that we're also approaching this from different fields and that our fields have differing approaches to the question of Disney. Sounds like you do law, whereas I do literary studies.

[Kneenibble]

You're going to need to explain. PM me if you're worried we're getting into too specific legal advice here. You're pulling rank on me here, but I teach copyright law at Harvard Law school, so when I say that an academic paper studying Disney images can use Disney images, you're either going to have to take my word for it or I can PM you a bunch of case citations.

Having said that, I will concede that if someone specifically went out of their way to piss off Disney, Disney certainly has the resources to make a lawsuit unpleasant.

I'd rather not get into it too much, actually. I've learned not to do anything I'm good at for free. :smalltongue:

It's just that I can very easily see -- though it be against the spirit of the law, and rather dickish -- how Disney could suppress the use of its material. Reputable journals aren't going to publish an image that came off tumblr, after all, and one requires explicit permission to use an image from an authoritative repository.

[snoopy13a]

To the OP: Did you create the image yourself or did you use code to insert an image that someone else created? I'm a little confused.

If you are using the code to display an image that someone else created, you have to give them credit. Check out a MLA-style book from your college library and find out how to cite art.

If you created the image yourself, then you'll still need a MLA-style book for the proper way to cite yourself.

Public domain only matters for copyright. If I'm writing a paper on Emma, I still need to cite references and quotes to Emma despite the fact that I can mass-produce and sell Emma texts.

[Anarion]

Maybe the professor I have (not a law professor, but a professor of film and comics studies) is just a fuddy duddy and overly cautious (he's also more interested in studying early romance comics, so he may not be as aware of the Disney studies and therefore not passing that information along). If you're right on the articles, then I'm going to guess he's either unaware or referring to book-length studies of Disney comics. Do you know of any?


It might be that we're also approaching this from different fields and that our fields have differing approaches to the question of Disney. Sounds like you do law, whereas I do literary studies.

No, I don't know of any large Disney studies. I wrote mine on the Air Pirates Comics, which were themselves a quashed parody of Mickey Mouse and it's not that long. There's a Walt Disney Family Museum which opened up a few years ago that would probably be the best place to look, as I imagine the Disney family themselves collected quite a bit of stuff.

There are a ton of articles on the Mouse himself, but generally academic works of that sort neither need nor want to cite pictures.
Edit: To clarify a "ton" a search for "Mickey Mouse" on the West database (primarily academic and legal journals) turns up over 1,500 articles, probably averaging about 60 pages each.

Also, an important distinction. If your professor wanted to publicly display works of Mickey Mouse to teach a class, he would potentially run into copyright trouble due to the arcane nature of the education exception, which is different than the academic exception.


I'd rather not get into it too much, actually. I've learned not to do anything I'm good at for free. :smalltongue:


Boring. :smalltongue:




It's just that I can very easily see -- though it be against the spirit of the law, and rather dickish -- how Disney could suppress the use of its material. Reputable journals aren't going to publish an image that came off tumblr, after all, and one requires explicit permission to use an image from an authoritative repository.

That sounds like an access problem. It's not that someone couldn't use a Mickey Mouse comic if they had one, but rather that the people that have all the old copies won't let you use them without permission, which is their call.

[snoopy13a]

There are a ton of articles on the Mouse himself, but generally academic works of that sort neither need nor want to cite pictures.
Edit: To clarify a "ton" a search for "Mickey Mouse" on the West database (primarily academic and legal journals) turns up over 1,500 articles, probably averaging about 60 pages each.



To be fair, I'll bet that many of those articles simply use "Mickey Mouse" as an adjective. Although, even outside IP stuff, which I'm sure has plenty of articles about Disney, the amount of legal scholarship on Literature and the Law* is surprisingly large--even Posner has gotten into the act. I don't know if the Literature and the Law people look at Mickey Mouse; they seem more preoccupied with people like Melville.

*Best way to determine an easy law school class--it ends with "and the Law." :smalltongue:

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: The discussion of citation requirements of MLA is permissible here, the legal advice not so much. Please review the Forum Rules.