Leadership Letter
May 2023
ASK COUNSELOR TARA
ASCE’s General Counsel Tara Hoke responds to legal questions posed by Sections and Branches here each month. Send Tara an email with your question.
How can we share a speaker’s presentation slides without infringing on rights?
It is common practice for sections, branches, and other ASCE entities holding a continuing education event to request copies of the speaker’s PowerPoint slides to share with attendees or to post on the group’s website. The benefit of this practice, of course, is that it extends the value of the speaker’s engagement to people who weren’t in attendance at an event, or who were in attendance but want to spend more time studying the material. However, there is also one potential pitfall to this practice; namely, the risk that the presenter’s material violates another’s intellectual property.
It is important for volunteer leaders to remember that copyright law is governed by a “strict liability” standard. What this means is a person can be liable for violating another person’s copyright even if the offender didn’t intend to infringe on the owner’s rights, and even if the offender wasn’t aware that the actions were infringing on the owner’s rights.
This issue most commonly arises with respect to the use of photos or graphics included on a speaker’s slides. All too often, a speaker preparing slides for an event may think it harmless to download images without permission from a third party’s website, either because an image perfectly illustrates the speaker’s point, or because the speaker wishes to liven up an otherwise unexciting slide. While it may indeed be low risk from a copyright standpoint to display slides at a small virtual event or face-to-face meeting, this risk is greatly magnified when these slides are then distributed widely by email, or worse hosted on a public website for anyone to view.
In addition, copyright ownership grants exclusive use of an image for an extremely long time – currently, for the life of an author plus 70 years (or for corporate owners, 95 years from publication). This means that even a set of slides that is buried on an ASCE website for a decade or more may still someday be the subject of a claim for an infringing use of another’s content.
To avoid a complaint from a copyright owner – or worse, a claim from a collection agency demanding payment for the unauthorized use – it is critical for any ASCE group seeking to post a slide presentation online to closely scrutinize the images used in the slide. If the slide contains graphics, GIFs, or videos that are not clearly the author’s own contribution, the group should ask the presenter to identify the source of the images or err on the side of caution and remove the image.