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Student Newspaper Archives, Fair Use, Licensing, and the DMCA

We are uncertain how to proceed with further digitization of our college’s student newspapers. Currently, the newspapers published between 1948 and 2016 are digitized. They were made available online through a page hosted on the college’s website as well as the NYS Historic Newspapers database.

Since the mid-2010s, articles from the newspaper have been published simultaneously online and in the print edition distributed across campus.

The college’s administration received a complaint from a company called Copytrack regarding two images used in past issues of the paper. The college’s response was to scrub the images from the online archive of past issues and restrict access to the archives, effectively removing the entire digitized collection of its archives from the newspaper’s website.

However, since the issues in question were from 2017 and 2018, the digitized collection still remains intact on NYS Historic Newspapers, where the library has it hosted. We’re uncertain what weight this complaint from Copytrack holds and hope to digitize the remainder of the publication soon, within the bounds of copyright restrictions.

After this copyright complaint, is it advisable to leave the collection in NYS Historic Newspapers and continue adding to it, or should we plan to take it down and only digitize future copies for in-house preservation purposes?

Copyright protocols for restaurant menus

(Question has been slightly modified to maintain anonymity)

We have been digitizing restaurant, hotel and other menus from our historical menu collection and have been following standard copyright protocols – but also making many case-by-case decisions based on things like whether of the establishment still exists, etc. (With only a couple exceptions I made for a faculty member who had permission of the restaurant owners, I haven’t scanned any menus from after 2000.) Our public collection site is used by students and researchers around the world.

My question is: can we scan and put online menus dated after 1977 (and especially more recent – up until 2021) if it is for educational purposes? If we do scan them, would we need permissions from every single chef/owner? The copyright status of menus in general has always seemed murky to me, but I don’t even know where to go to find clear answers for this situation.