The other day I was mentioning how much help the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) Image Use Protocol Guide is for anyone trying to obtain copyright permission to use an image from a Japanese source in a conversation with colleagues, and I realized that I had not yet blogged about it here. This is a much belated effort to correct that oversight!
It is especially embarrassing since I was a speaker at the momentous conference in June 2008 at Tokyo’s International House of Japan where scholars, librarians, publishers, museum curators and others came together to discuss overcoming barriers to efficient and legal use of Japanese images in works published outside Japan. The proceedings of the Tokyo IUP Conference (in Japanese) are now online at the Shibusawa Eiichi Memorial Foundation, including my talk about the importance of Japanese images for North American scholarship on Japan. Summary information about that 2008 conference in English is available on the NCC web site.
To use the NCC Image Use Protocol Guide, one can start by browsing for cases that are similar to the one you are investigating in the “When Permission is Required” section, which links to the appropriate templates. Permission request templates are conveniently collected with bilingual sample letters. The site also provides links to other organizations that provide guidance. There is a comment section inviting people to share experience and give tips to others based on what they learned.
A lot of effort went into developing this resource, so please use it!
