Rights and Wrongs

There are a lot of things I love about writing books. Getting permission is not one of them.

A non-fiction book like 'Nightmare in the Pacific' involves reliance on an untold number of sources. At one point, the manuscript included upwards of 850 footnotes. In many if not most of the cases, the citation was sufficient to allow use of the intellectual property that still belonged to another; for instance, a quote from a DownBeat article.

But in some cases, the nature of the material or the extent of its intended was such that it seemed I needed to secure permission from the individual or entity that retained the rights. The use of the ambiguous "seemed" hints at one of the problems. Copyright law is tricky, and there aren't alwaus hard-and-fast rules governing what can be freely used under what's called the "fair use" doctrine.

Conclude that permission is required, and a whole new adventure ensues in the search for the rights owner who is willing to say "yes."

For instance, in the course of my research I came across the 'George Thoma Collection" held at the University of Chicago Library. Thoma's World War II Navy service overlapped with Artie Shaw's, and he took a number of interesting photgraphs of Artie and the band members in Hawaii.

They were perfect for my purpose.

The University of Chicago's librarian informed me the Thoma family retained the rights. I used George Thoma's obituary to identify surviving family members and their hometowns, then used Nexis and other databases to locate phone numbers.

I reached one of Mr. Thoma's daughters, who said use of the photos seemed fine with her, but she needed to check with siblings. But when I called back after waiting a number of weeks, she apologized and said other family members objected to use of the photographs. I wanted to ask something like "Then why did the family give the photos to the library?" but I saw no purpose in arguing. I was not going to be able to change this wrong rights decision.