Thanks for clarifying.TheXDarkXDragoness wrote:I'm saying if you went and posted a picture of Fluttershy from MLP, it is not theft because it is a widely distributed show, and that is a thing to be expected when you are a widespread company. Think. If MLP fans are not allowed to write fanstories and draw the characters and post their pictures they have 0 fanbase now. But personal characters are not meant to become spread out, and are for personal use only. Widely distributed characters are not personal characters. Commercial characters are followed by a separate set of rules than personal ones.
I've already agreed with you that it doesn't make sense for a company to try and stop their fans from doing fan things, but I find the claim that companies should expect that kind of thing, while people publishing their personal characters should not, to be problematic. Where do you draw the line between personal characters and "commercial" ones? Not in the act of publishing or widely distributing in itself, I assume, because posting your personal character artwork on DA could easily qualify for that. Some people are even offering commissions that depict their personal characters interacting with the commissioner's personal characters, so unless you're willing to exclude those from being personal characters, commercial use won't do either. What if someone has a webcomic going about their personal characters, which becomes so popular that it is eventuall published in print, perhaps even sparks the founding of a company? Suddenly not a personal character anymore?
Fan art is fan art, why would fan art of someone's personal character not be ok, provided that it is indeed fanart i.e. clearly labeled as a fan's depiction of this awesome character chreated and owned by so and so? Taking someone's work and claiming it as your own or not commenting on where you got it from is something else entirely. Perhaps the fact that MLP is so widely known allows us to be more sloppy in making clear that this is just fan art, because saying "I drew fluttershy! Look!" is enough to tell everyone where that character came from, but I can't find any in principle difference to personal characters here.
Every character in existence was created by someone at some point and someone out there is bound to be attatched to this character.
I'm only really familiar with German copyright law, which tends to be a little more strict (that is protective of the artist) than others, but from what I've seen so far, the basic principles are always about the same. I'll try to give you an idea, but take it with a grain of salt.Raneth wrote:I'm actually curious about all this because I can't seem to wrap my head around art and its uses and such. I feel like things get into thorny grey areas very quickly. For example:
Someone uses an image off of a stock photo website for a project, or gets it through a royalty-free website (say, shutterstock). Let's say they use it in a collage. Then someone else decides to copy the image from the collage and use it for something else. It's still a royalty-free image, so is there harm there in using it if its been paid for once? Who owns the rights to the collage image, shutterstock or the collage-maker? How do people prevent the image from getting paid for once and then propogating all over the internet?
Note that I'm not making any moral claims here, just suggesting ways to handle such situations while keeping out of any grey areas as far as possible. Nor am I giving any kind of legal advice, only lawyers should do that. This is just what I would feel comfortable doing as an artist myself who has actually bothered to read her homecountry's copyright law.
Spoiler
Of course, if someone uses a stock photo, it's ok for anyone to uses that same stock photo for their work, but they should get it from the place that provided the stock photo, not copy it out of someone else's work. How would they know which of the images used in that collage were ok to use otherwise? The artist may have taken some of the photos used themselves and those may not be free to use.
As a rule of the thumb, the artists agreement is by default required for the use of anything they created, unless you're just using it for practice and intend to leave it in your desk drawer and never publish. They may state that it is free to use for anyone, in which case everyone who knows about that is free to use it, but it is never safe to just assume something is free to use because someone else used it - they may have a special agreement with the photographer that doesn't make the image free to use for anyone else.
"If you cannot find a resource's copyright or usage permission information, do not use that resource."
It's sometimes sad to never get a chance to at least ask for permission to use a particular photo, but if you can't track it, there's no way to get it. Chances are that the person who put it there in the first place didn't have permission to do so, or the photo would not be floating around without a snippet of copyright information.
If the person was to merely provide a link to the place where the artist has published the image in question without making any further claims to it, I think that would be pretty unproblematic.
It's always safer to just use free to use photographs for that kind of thing, just to be sure.
As a rule of the thumb, the artists agreement is by default required for the use of anything they created, unless you're just using it for practice and intend to leave it in your desk drawer and never publish. They may state that it is free to use for anyone, in which case everyone who knows about that is free to use it, but it is never safe to just assume something is free to use because someone else used it - they may have a special agreement with the photographer that doesn't make the image free to use for anyone else.
The rules of the Hall of the Arts forum on here state this one very nicely:Raneth wrote: If there's a photo just sitting out there on the internet with no information about artist/photographer or anything, how does one figure out if its free to use or not?
"If you cannot find a resource's copyright or usage permission information, do not use that resource."
It's sometimes sad to never get a chance to at least ask for permission to use a particular photo, but if you can't track it, there's no way to get it. Chances are that the person who put it there in the first place didn't have permission to do so, or the photo would not be floating around without a snippet of copyright information.
That depends. If posting that image means uploading it to some image hosting website and then posting it to a forum, then no, that shouldn't be done without permission.Raneth wrote:What about reference images? If someone, say, decides that their character looks really similar to a certain image, can they post that as a reference and say "this looks similar" and leave it at that without claiming any ownership of the image? Or does the reference image have to be something the person owns?
If the person was to merely provide a link to the place where the artist has published the image in question without making any further claims to it, I think that would be pretty unproblematic.
That's a good one. Something like this is in principle possible, but again these cases are extremely hard to judge. There are vague guidelines about the re-imagined piece having to have its own creative value above/independent of that of the original image. Just re-drawing a photograph you like, no matter how well executed, will most probably not do the trick here, slapping a "sketchify" filter on certainly won't.Raneth wrote:Can someone take a piece of art and completely re-imagine it in a large enough way that it becomes something new? Like taking a photograph and using it as the reference for a sketch or something? What if they take the photo and use a program to "sketchify" it? When is it okay versus not okay?
It's always safer to just use free to use photographs for that kind of thing, just to be sure.