NAC and NEF Annual Meeting
Doug Hickok, NAC and NEF Board Member
The 2020 Naturist Action Committee and Naturist Education Foundation
Annual Meetings were held last weekend. The board meetings for
the nine members scattered coast-to-coast took place via eighteen
hours of Zoom meetings, in two-hour blocks, evenly spaced out across
three days to keep
our
sanity us refreshed and revitalized to pursue moving forward!
All-in-all, the meetings went very well with much being
accomplished! Many areas were looked at, first reflecting on the
past, and then looking forward anticipating and planning for the
future of the organizations, always with a critical and nurturing eye
to the larger picture and organizational climate.
Why do we spend so much time together for this meeting? It's
much more than simply electing officers, making appointments, and the
other required agenda items. One of our board members happens to
be a strategic planning consultant, so we have professional help with
reviewing, evaluating progress, and modifying our missions and
long-range goal plans as necessary. That flows down into
reviewing the many projects the organizations are working on and the
action plans for each. Meeting our legal and fiduciary duties as
board members is about protecting, overseeing, and directing the
organizations toward their missions while ensuring nonprofit 501c3 and
501c4 compliance.
With NAC (a 501c4) and NEF (a 501c3) being two separate
organizations with similar, but different, goals, programs,
strategies, and governance requirements, that means these steps are
all multiplied by two.
As always, progress on these many varied projects will be reported
here, so stay tuned!
Naturist Action Committee Goes to the Aid of Yet Another Nude
Beach Visitor, This Time in Florida
NAC Board
During July 2020 a visitor to Florida's Playalinda Beach in Canaveral
National Seashore (CNS/NPS) was cited by a Park Ranger for being
merely nude while sunbathing on the beach near parking lot #5.
Playalinda Beach has a recognized traditional nude beach section in
the area of parking lots 12 & 13.
The visitor from the state of Georgia had picked up the information on
the nude beach at Playalinda Beach from the State of Florida's
official tourist information site,
Visit Florida.
However, the Visit Florida site does not list the appropriate parking
lot location and Canaveral National Seashore has no signs to identify
where the traditional nude beach is located.
The visitor, known here as A.S. was ticketed for Exposure of Sex Organ
and Disorderly Conduct. A.S. then contacted the Naturist Action
Committee (NAC) for assistance.
A.S. was advised that mere nudity, absent any sexual activity, in
Florida or in a National Park on Federal land is not classified as
Indecent Exposure or Lewd & Lascivious Behavior.
Also, for the charge of Disorderly Conduct, there has to be a third
person as a complaining party. That person(s) would have to come
forward and sign a complaint with their name and address, and agree to
show up in court to testify. The park officer cannot be the
complaining party. (A 6th Amendment, US Constitutional issue)
The representative of the Naturist Action Committee advised A.S. of
their rights and seriousness of his situation, and recommended that he
first acquire an attorney, and under no circumstance not show up in
court, and do not plead 'No Contest' which is basically considered the
same as a plea of guilty. It would lead to a conviction by the
judge and allow for the same sentencing options as a guilty plea.
A conviction on the 'Exposure of Sex Organ' charge, while over-broad,
could have a person's name end up on a Sexual Predators List.
The NAC representative immediately wrote a letter to the Park
Superintendent outlining the errors in the citation and requesting the
citation be voided. The conversation was professional and
objective. The superintendent agreed to look into the situation
and act according to the law and the advice of the US Attorney.
A.S. received a summons to the federal court in Orlando. He did
not hire an attorney because the fee quoted was going to be in excess
of $4000.
When A.S. arrived at the court, he was met by the chief ranger and the
ranger that issued the citation. They informed him that the
citation had been cancelled and apologized to him for the mistake and
any inconvenience they caused him.
Note: the Naturist Action Committee is not a law firm and only acts to
educate the public of their rights to a fair trial in the justice
system.
[
Editor's Note:
For NAC to provide this service,
we maintain a reference page with the laws in each state (here) and case law in the Toni Egbert Law
Library (here). We sincerely hope that we never
need to help you out of a citation, but if we do, wouldn't you want
these references to be as complete and up-to-date as possible?
You can help with that by donating to NAC.]
Research Request Policy Change
Doug Hickok, NEFRL Director
The NEF Research Library, like most other libraries, has a process to
let researchers request articles (and other things) called a "Research
Request". (The form is on the
main library page.) There were a couple
significant considerations that went into defining that process.
First, the process needs to meet "fair use" standards. This
is true of every library.
Second, unique to the nature of our content, images of naked people
should be limited in some way. There are a lot of people out
there who enjoy copying and redistributing images with nudity, without
any consideration of copyright. There had to be some way to
limit this.
My initial intent was to use money as a limiter on the number of
photos going out with research requests. As part of the Research
Request, we suggested a donation to be made of $10 for an article of
XEROX quality (+$5 each additional article), or $15 for an article
with full color and quality (+$10 each additional article). If a
researcher was interested in the article text, then XEROX quality
would be perfect for them. The additional cost of full color and
quality meant the researcher was likely planning to include an image
with their work, or the image was an important part of the
research. As you can see, an attempt to snag lots of images
would be an expensive endeavor.
After I announced our
Search tool last month, a complaint was received
by the consortium. The publisher of a magazine was unhappy that
the general public could search for and then eventually receive
articles, and that NEFRL could be receiving donation money for their
copyrighted work.
Full Disclosure: To date, no researchers have actually paid
the suggested donation amounts. Prior to February, suggested
donations weren't mentioned as part of the Research Request. And
after COVID hit, most haven't been in a stable financial
situation. Keep in mind that it was written as a requested
donation -- as a charitable organization and library, we still
fulfilled requests. Also noteworthy is that none of the requests
that have been filled have been for articles from the publisher that
complained.
As a precautionary measure, I reviewed the copyright laws again and
verified that our Research Request process is adhering to them.
(Specifically Title 17 Section 108: "Limitations on Exclusive Rights:
Reproduction by libraries and archives" as enacted in 1976 and the
Model Statutory Language as drafted and last distributed in
2017.) During this, I did find two areas that needed improving.
First, Title 17 Section 108(d)(2) specifies that our order form
must contain the copyright warning language dictated by the Register
of Copyrights. Although I already had language in there that
conveys the same intent, I added this at the end of the form anyway.
Second, Section 108(a)(1) states "the reproduction or distribution
is made without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial
advantage." It's not entirely clear what "commercial advantage"
actually means. For researchers, buying the whole magazine for
$10 from the publisher would've been cheaper than having NEFRL process
the request for an article. I've experienced other libraries and
museums charging money for Research Requests, either to cover hours
spent by the staff to process and distribute the request, or for
licensing fees depending on the intended use. I genuinely didn't
see any harm in requesting a donation, and the request certainly
wasn't a "commercial advantage" for NEFRL. Either way, this
"commercial advantage" concept actually stems from the "Gentleman's
Agreement" of 1935, around the time photo-duplication became available
for printed works. At that time, the source institution was not
allowed to make a profit from the duplicated work. Again, what
is "profit"? Could they cover material costs, labor, or
operational costs? I'm still not entirely clear on this.
Certainly it would be hard to find a library currently that provides
free copies of materials. Even when patrons do their own
research and request copies, they are charged or directed to a copying
machine that requires payment.
In an abundance of caution after the one complaint, and in
recognition of the fact that NEF is a charitable organization whose
mission includes educating the general public about naturism, we
have decided to drop the "requested donation" from the Research
Request process, and all fulfillments will be in full-quality
instead of XEROX quality.
We will evaluate each request on a case-by-case basis and see how
it goes.
To recap:
Research Requests: Free starting this month.
Digital Loans: As from the start, still free with a (free)
library membership.
If you support libraries, or support our naturist library, or
support the work that we're doing to make items available to the
public, or simply support the educational mission Lee Baxandall
started decades ago, we ask that you consider a
donation
to the Naturist Education Foundation.
Thank you for all your support so far!
