Copyright Archive materials and their ownership

The Irish Left Archive is provided as a general historical resource, open to all. We aim to do so without compromising the ownership or original intent of the materials contained in it.

In the majority of cases, the documents and posters we reproduce were intended for widespread dissemination, as a means to expose people to the ideas expressed in them, or to further awareness of the organisation which produced them. As a result, we believe our reproduction of them is in the spirit of their original production, rather than prejudicing the interests of the copyright holders. Further, other than to scan and digitize them, we do not modify the original materials.

As such, we are confident that our reproduction of these materials constitutes fair use.

We are happy to attribute ownership where it can reasonably be discerned. In the case of the type of political materials contained in the archive, actual ownership can be difficult to identify. Particularly with the more informally produced documents, ownership may reside with any number of contributors (often un-attributed or pseudonymous) unless rights were specifically ceded to the organisation responsible for producing the final materials. In light of this difficulty, we feel it is reasonable to identify the organisation and the named contributors for each document.

For all materials, copyright remains with the original authors. However, in most cases non-commercial re-use of the materials constitutes fair use. In a very few cases where we have reproduced photographs, while we have permission to display these, the owners may assert copyright over other uses. Each item in the archive has a note underneath the details at the top of the page: this remains the same for most materials, but any exceptions are identified on their respective pages.

As considerable effort has gone into scanning, cataloguing and archiving these materials, we would appreciate if any re-use of materials downloaded from the ILA would acknowledge this by providing attribution (or, in the case of a website, a link back) to the ILA, as well as the original authors.

Thanks to Orla Egan of Cork LGBT Archive for her helpful work on this issue: Copyright Issues in Community Digital Archives