Nevertheless, I commenced with an exploration of recent case law related to U.S. Copyright Law that also conveniently fulfilled the research paper requirement for an Education Law course. I should clarify that I am not qualified to provide legal advice, but have just been doing a little extra homework. Nor are the views in this paper necessarily those of UC, Irvine or the University of California in general. Current copyright literature always recommends site-specific legal counsel. There is only time today to mention a few of the cases that I found encouraging and influential, but I should not neglect the fact that there are many discouraging ones too. Since there is no specific case law dealing with copyright infringement in higher education's visual resources collections, I turned to similar cases in evaluating which ones might pertain to LUCI or provide precedents for the future. There are two recent cases in particular that stood out as fair use victories in the courts, one in 1986 and one in 1997, Haberman v. Hustler Magazine, Inc. and Ringgold v. Black Entertainment Network (BET) and Home Box Office (HBO) respectively. The former case involved an artist who made postcards of his art works, registered the book of postcards, and then sold them. Hustler Magazine purchased a postcard book and published some of the images in an article without permission. The artist sued, but Hustler won on a fair use defense even though the magazine is a commercial venture! The following quote from the case is somewhat analogous to the situation in slide libraries, "[The] Magazine's use of reproductions of fine art postcards did not have [the] purpose or effect of supplanting [the] artist's use of them so as to weigh against a finding of fair use where the reproductions were not of comparable size or quality and would not serve as a suitable substitute for someone wishing to collect art or share it with another by sending a postcard." Slides and digital images have never been considered substitutes for the art represented in them, but are visual surrogates. In the latter case, Ringgold v. BET and HBO, the artist, Faith Ringgold, brought an action for copyright infringement against BET and HBO for displaying a poster of her copyrighted original work of fine art, "Church Picnic Story Quilt", in a television sitcom episode. BET and HBO did not seek permission to reproduce, display, and transmit the art work nor did they credit Ringgold as the creator. A finding of fair use in favor of the defendants was made for a variety of reasons. The copyrighted poster was used as a TV backdrop, only visible for a few seconds, and was not intended to exploit the artist's work or substitute for the poster. It also did not have any adverse consequences regarding the artist's ability to sell or license the poster in the future. Slide collections do not exploit artists' work and the educational purpose does not alter the potential market for or value of the work though it could be argued that it improves it. Last but certainly not least, the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Reno v. the American Civil Liberties Union makes strong statements about the free exchange of information on the Internet that is supportive of our educational missions (http://www.gse.ucla.edu/iclp/hp.html). In the conclusion, it is stated strong and clear, As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that government regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship. That anxieties about copyright law prevent some photographic archives in higher education from making their vast collections of images available to the world on the Internet, clearly prevents the free exchange of ideas and freedom of expression expected in a learning environment. In this case, which had the added complication of the issue of pornography, the Web was compared to, ". . . a vast library including millions of readily available and indexed publications and a sprawling mall offering goods and services." That these statements were made by the U.S. Supreme Court, the highest court in the land to which all the lower courts must respond, is critical to understanding the enormous impact that these words might have on future Internet-related copyright decisions in general and VR collections in particular, if we are lucky! Principles Needless to say, I found these cases very encouraging in terms of LUCI until I did my homework on the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU). Adapting copyright law to changing technologies is clearly going to be a sisyphian task. Although the results of CONFU were generally disheartening, I viewed the lack of endorsement by a variety of professional organizations, including the VRA, as impressive statements of the impracticability of such rigid guidelines in today's rapidly changing world of technological innovation. On the positive side, CONFU has motivated many like-minded organizations to develop clear statements of established practices and guiding principles regarding the fair use of images in both analog and digital formats. The National Humanities Alliance's "Basic Principles for Managing Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment" (http://www-ninch.chi.org/ISSUES/COPYRIGHT/PRINCIPLES/NHA_Complete.html) is one of many examples that Christine Sundt has been collecting and making easily accessible on her Web page (http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/cweb.htm). We will surely be hearing more this week about what the VRA's Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights Committee is accomplishing too. Comfort Zone At this point it seemed like a good idea to try and determine more specifically what visual resources colleagues are doing to increase their comfort levels in terms of abiding by U.S. Copyright Law when dabbling with the new technology. Digital images are being utilized in slide collections for primarily four types of educational uses: instructional tutorials, image study and research, online catalogues, and projection in the classroom. These applications require different levels of image quality and varying viewing contexts each of which comes with its own legal baggage. When contacting visual resources and librarian colleagues, I discovered that our heightened sensitivity to copyright law has created an atmosphere of uncertainty and perturbation. We are probably all a little reluctant to discuss our interpretations of the law and the resulting specifications of our projects (though I thank those of you who responded to my e-mail query). So, I will not be referring to specific projects or identifying institutions in the following summary of visual resources collections' copyright comfort zones. The following is a summary exploration of present visual resources practices related to copyright compliance. To organize the discussion, I have grouped practices into three separate copyright comfort categories related to: 1) fair use, 2) technological limitations, and 3) licensing. In reality, there is much overlap between these areas and there will surely be even more in the future.