COPYRIGHT and Use of Interviews

The narrator of an interview and the Texas After Violence Project are co-creators of that interview.

The narrator, as an individual, and the Texas After Violence Project, as an independent non-profit corporation organized in Texas in 2007, share the copyright, but not on an equal basis. The narrator has full rights to use the interview in any way she or he wants. The Texas After Violence Project has limited rights.

If you use these materials, please cite the source fully. Include the individual narrator's name, the Texas After Violence Project, the copyright year, and the publication at or in which you found the interview. As of November 2011, these interviews are only published in three places: the Texas After Violence Project website; the Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI) of the University of Texas Libraries; and the Texas After Violence Project youtube channel. Portions of any given interview may be at one, two, or all three of these sites.

Narrator rights

Interview narrators retain the rights to do whatever they wish with their own interviews or interview materials in any form: physical or digital, tangible or intangible.

Permissible uses by the Texas After Violence Project

The Texas After Violence Project, by agreement with each narrator, has limited rights. TAVP may only use the interview materials for non-commercial and educational purposes, including sharing the material with non-commercial educational institutions, libraries or archives, and community organizations. A non-profit community group might show a portion of an interview to stimulate conversations; a religious congregation might share a video; a teacher might show an interview to her or his class.

In some but not all cases the narrators have approved web publication.

The Texas After Violence Project, at its discretion, may and does temporarily or indefinitely withhold portions of interviews or entire interviews from publication, even when narrators have donated the interviews for publication, when there are compelling ethical reasons to do so.

The Texas After Violence Project will make available recordings of fully public interviews at a reasonable cost to non-commercial, non-profit libraries and educational institutions. Any proceeds will go towards the costs of producing and reproducing the interviews, and/or towards support of the project so that it may continue conducting interviews. No one will financially profit from the sale of interview materials.

The project will not give or sell written transcripts or audio or audio-visual recordings of interviews to individual people.If you are a researcher who wishes to use material that is public but not on the web, please ask a librarian at your nearest or favorite public library or non-commercial educational institution to contact us: info[at]texasafterviolence[dot]org

What about rights of individual Texas After Violence Project staff, interns, volunteers, board members, funders, students working with the project. and friends to use interview materials?

There are NO special rights for members of the Texas After Violence Project. NO individual person has any rights to interview materials other than those granted by the narrator to the public. When the materials are open to the public, Texas After Violence Project people, including students working with the project, may use these materials on the same basis as any other member of the public.

# 1 Frequently Asked Question: I am an amazing and dedicated Texas After Violence Project volunteer, and I am also a student. May I use an interview in my paper, article, report, thesis, dissertation? Please?

Answer # 1 will remain the same no matter how many times or in how many creative ways you ask the question: Only when the interview narrator has donated her or his interview to the Texas After Violence Project and approved publication. Not before!

# 2 Another Frequently Asked Question: I conducted (or videotaped, or transcribed, or edited, or otherwise worked on) an interview that I really want to use in my paper, article, report, thesis or dissertation. The narrator has not yet donated the interview to the Texas After Violence Project. May I ask the narrator if, in the meantime, I may quote her in my paper, article, report, thesis or dissertation?

Answer #2: NO.

No contributor -- interviewer, videographer, transcriber, auditor, editor, information specialist, indexer, researcher, writer of annotations, or anyone else -- has any special rights to any interview or portion thereof. Students and researchers who work in any capacity, paid or not, for the Texas After Violence Project may reference a particular interview when the interview narrator has donated the material to the project, consented to its public release, and the project has published the interview at its website or via the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, BUT NOT BEFORE THAT TIME.

The project serves public education and conversations. It also serves individual academic or other research interests but only when the material is available through at least one public source.

None of us "own" any interview material in any sense whatsoever. Please review the Texas After Violence Project Code of Conduct.

Interviews and interview materials may not be used for any commercial purposes except with the explicit permission of an individual narrator to use her or his own interview only. The Texas After Violence Project cannot and will not grant permission for commercial use or non-educational use.