Copyright & Artists Who Eat You

[Crow'sia]

It’s long, but this will likely be one of the few required readings on this site, apart from the rules. Please take a moment. (: This is pretty much an updated version of Kindred's post in Graphic Request.

It’s come to my attention while floating around as the a disembodied head that I am, that we need to take a second to discuss the implications of copyright as some signatures look questionable to me. Now, don’t be offended or worried or even upset if this ends up pertaining to you. We don’t all know the details of copyright, and I certainly didn’t until a few years ago. Certainly no one is being punished, or is in any form of trouble. That’s not how I roll. You’ll really find punishment here to be pretty much nonexistent expect in the odd extreme case. This isn’t extreme, it’s just that most people aren’t required to know about copyright.

Two things to know: copyright is very serious and we must follow American copyright law. This is particularly important since Proboards Terms of Service state that we agree not to post copyrighted material. Proboards has to say this, because any upset artist could choose to charge them for copyright infringement, but the greater likelihood is that they’ll mail me with a warning or just outright delete the forum before that happens. Unfortunately, that likely depends on the server administrator who gets the angry email so it is best to avoid the situation all together.

So we can’t have any images on the site that we don’t have rights to. Now, what images are these?

These are usually images that we find on Google or Yahoo search, on horse breeder/ show websites, and many other random places around the web. Photographs are ‘intellectual property’ and automatically copyrighted for 70 years after the artist’s death, at which time the work becomes ‘public domain’. As a general rule, if the image mentions nothing at all about copyright anywhere, then you should not use it. This image is copyrighted, but the artist knows that putting up a sign saying so is unnecessary.

So what images can we use, and how do we know it is okay to use them?

There are several stock resource sites around the web that provide photographs for artists and photo-manipulators to incorporate into their work. These images have their own set of rules.

These sites include Stock.Xchng, DeviantART, and Flickr. There are a million more, so if you know any, please do mention them here!

All these sites work similar. Some photos you will find listed as ‘Unrestricted’ or ‘Creative Commons’ of some sort. If you take a closer look at those licenses, likely you can use the work as you desire. Here is a handy list of the Creative Commons licenses creativecommons.org/about/licenses.

It is important to know, however, that not every images on Flickr and Stock.Xchng is free to use.

There is also deviantART. For those that don’t know yet, DA has a section under ‘Resources’ specifically for Stock images. This is where you would start your search. After that, it is important to look at the photographer’s rules. Sometimes these rules are listed in journals, sometimes on the deviation itself. Many artists require a small credit on the image, beside it, or elsewhere on the site. If they don’t require credit on the image itself, but just on the site, you can notify me and I’ll add your signature banner’s and other such art’s credit info right into the Credit page itself, and that way your signatures won’t be full of extra content.

With my sister’s permission, I will also be stopping by at the horse farm she works at on occasion to take photographs for members to use at NSE in whatever manner they like, as well as other places around my big old farming community. So hopefully we will see that in the coming weeks. If anyone would like to add to such a resource, I’ll be posting up a discussion for it later today.

That’s all. I know it was long, but thanks for reading.

[billy]

I think, you're really brilliant. So, thanks for your fantastic informative post.