If an image is included in an abstract which is published at a conference, does that mean the conference must give permission if it's used in a paper?

Question

I'm advising some students preparing abstracts proposing posters at an international conference.

I was just asked about putting images in the abstract that represent data. It's a photograph of a phosphorescent screen which we use as raw data for fitting, but it's certainly an image as well.

The image is not much more than thumbnail size and in a published paper would start from the original .bmp or .png and therefore be much larger, processed differently and carefully annotated.

The conference submission guidelines include this relevant bullet:

• The Author agrees to and does hereby assign all rights, title and interest, including copyrights, in and to the abstract to the Publisher. When the abstract is ready for publication, it will be published at the Publisher's own expense, under the Publisher's name in a conference abstract.

I'm at a loss how to advise the students and today is the last day for submission (as usual).

This questions asks only about including or not including the image in the published abstract. I gather that the poster itself remains the property of the student and PI.

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Different but potentially related:

• What does assigning the copyright of a paper mean?
• How to legally re-use images in paper and still continue to use and distribute them in slides?

Answer 1

Do not give away the copyrights of images that you would like to publish in a paper, unless you think that the image will be an outstanding contribution to your poster (it looks like it does not).

Giving away the rights to something is not intrinsically bad (depending on your ethics/moral conventions), but you will need to spend an additional 5 minutes in the future whenever you want to reuse that image (you will always need to check with the publisher, it is 99% sure they will let you use it for free if you use it in a research/academic context ...).

Answer 2

Note that copyright covers expression, not ideas (nearly everywhere, but laws differ). It is tha specific image that you would give up copyright to, not the underlying data. And not to a different image based on that data. But, it needs to be sufficiently different. I'm surprised, though, that a publisher would care about copyright of posters.

Moreover, when you give up copyright to a publisher you normally get back a license for certain uses. Those uses might not include the right to republication other than in a dissertation. You need to investigate and understand that license, since it gives you some rights, but not all rights. And, if necessary, you can ask the publisher for a more generous license.

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Note also that a copyright owner controls publication of "derived works", hence the requirement that a new image be "sufficiently different". A bit subtle, of course. But (most jurisdictions) copyright is a civil law matter so it is up to the copyright owner to complain. One basis of complaint is that the infringing work reduces the "value" of the original, which seems unlikely here, though not impossible to imagine.