The one above features Student Government chief justice (and nice guy) Mike Burdman. But what's behind his head matters most to the University Press.
The background is a bonfire, and it has the UP's art director breathing fire. She shot that bonfire picture, and she never gave Burdman permission to use it for anything other than a single flier last year.
I can't blame an SG leader for resurrecting some old photos he found on his computer. Burdman knows as much about copyright law as I know about parliamentary procedure.
But FAU's student media director should know better. Yet Marti Harvey not only backs Burdman's background, she says it can happen again – and there's nothing the newspaper can do about it."You are employees, and you are doing the work for the University Press under that guise, and because of that, the material does belong to the university," Marti told EIC Karla Bowsher last week.
When Karla protested, Marti expounded...
It’s much like if I did research as an employee of the university. The university then owns the rights to any research that I do. You’re treated as part-time employees, and actually, part-time employees with any other media outlet would still be in the same position.
LIBEL TO FAIL
That's a terrible way of doing business, says Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center outside Washington, D.C.
And it should give the FAU attorney a fit, LoMonte says.
"I'd be very surprised if they ran this by a lawyer," he says, "because no lawyer would structure it this way."
Why? In a word, liability. Employers are responsible for the actions of their employees. Anyone who's worked with college students would quake at the thought of being legally responsible for some of the stupid crap they pull.
At the UP, that means FAU is liable for libel. Before Student Affairs vice president Charles Brown changed the system, UP staffers were paid a "training wage" as independent contractors. If the paper libeled someone, FAU wasn't on the hook for damages.
It is now, LoMonte says.
NOT OWNING UP
Marti was unmoved by LoMonte's arguments.
"I beg to differ with the Student Press Law Center," she told Karla. "In any media entity that I have ever worked for, the work you do for that entity belongs to that entity."
By "entity," Marti means FAU. While many campus newspapers retain the rights to all stories and photos the staff produces, Marti insists the university actually owns the stuff.
I checked with some other public universities and found nothing remotely like this. Here's a sentence from the policy manual at a large school in the southeast: "Ownership of unpublished work may revert to the staff at the discretion of the editor."
And the adviser there emailed me, "Ownership in NO way belongs to the university. On those few occasions when the university wanted to use photographs shot by newspaper staff, they have always had to obtain permission first."
What's even weirder is that FAU has long been on a mission to become a "traditional university." Yet I can't find one traditional university that claims ownership of its students' journalism. One adviser at a private Florida school was astonished: "We're private, and we'd never say that." In fact, LoMonte called FAU's policy "an untraditional setting."
So why do things this way?
"There's only one reason," LoMonte says. "And that's if they wanted to control editorial decisions."
TOMORROW: The real reason explained.
