Dear Colleagues: Many of you have seen the Economists Portraits page
at the Center for the History of Political Economy’s (CHOPE) website
(http://hope.econ.duke.edu/node/42). The documentation at the site
currently suggests that higher resolution versions of the portraits
might be available for use following requests made to me. This wording
will be modified on the site as soon as we are able to do so in order
to make clear that we will ONLY allow use of these web portraits in
web documents.  The issue clearly is that of provenance and
publication rights. The largest group of portraits was a set of
portraits photographed from a number of earlier portraits owned by
various faculty members in the Department of Economics of the
University of Wisconsin in 1921. Specifically, those portraits were
loaned to the University of Wisconsin photographer for him to copy
them and make them available to faculty and students there for a
nominal charge per print. One full set was bought by Frank Fetter, who
left them to Warren Samuels, who gave them to the Duke Economics
Department. Other portraits were obtained from disparate sources, the
largest batch of which came from Sidney Weintraub’s personal
collection. At present, we cannot assure private individuals or
publishers that public use of the portraits in published works will be
entirely free of “rights” issues in all cases.  Thus publishing such
materials without permission may present serious legal difficulties.
We will however to continue to permit fair use of the images in web
documents.As a related matter, we at CHOPE are cognizant that some
historians of economics are using, and have used, either images of, or
direct quotation of, the full texts of various letters found in the
Economists Papers Project archive without obtaining permission from
the holders of the rights to those materials. We must caution
especially younger scholars that all these archival materials are
governed by use agreements with the many donors, and that the
Rubinstein Rare Book, Special Collections, and Manuscript Library is
vigilant in its protection of the rights of the donors as stated in
the gift agreements.

-- 
E. Roy Weintraub
Professor of Economics
Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy
Duke University
www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html