In our final evaluation of the Membership and Museum Library agreements these two issues have come up.

In sections 4.2 and 5.2 of the Membership Agreement our counsel interprets 4.2.2 as language specifying assignment of copyright to AMICO. Section 5.2 however indicates a licensing of the copyright. Our understanding was that we were licensing our works to AMICO for sub-license to educational institutions. In an off-list posting to David and Jennifer (where we originally asked for clarification of this issue) they have said AMICO is asking members to assign rights to specific works 'contributed multimedia documentation' to AMICO 'solely as a part of or in conjunction with the compilation and distribution of the AMICO Library.' Our questions are: Are we assigning or licensing our works to AMICO? If we are assigning are all the members aware of that? Has any other member been advised of this issue in their reviews of the documents?

The second issue deals with the effect of termination. Again as advised by counsel, under the membership agreement the PMA may withdraw from participation in AMICO. This would terminate PMA's obligation to contribute additional material to AMICO but still bind us to existing sub-licenses. Since the sub-licenses includes an automatic renewal provision (18.1 in the Museum Library Agreement) our counsel suggests that PMA might not ever be able to retract its works totally from AMICO.

We are still very supportive of this effort and want to move forward. We would encourage any other institution having issues with the contracts or that any changes or clarifications already made on individual contracts be posted to this list so that we can all feel comfortable signing these agreements.