A Word About Copyright

euripides said:

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COPYRIGHT FREE material is available from various sources on the internet, such as FlickR.com and sxc.hu and various other royalty-free photography distributors. Sometimes the contributors to these resources apply restrictions, so again check the conditions on the specific image you wish to use.

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Azurylipfe said:

Actually i asked LLewellyn this question if I need to gain permission for the free restriction stock i used in my tarot deck, and they told me that even If its free restriction it is also best to get a written permission from the one that took the shot, just in case they change their terms of use later..
also if you use your own photo's for references, there are a few that you need to gain permission even if they are your own photo's, like famous buildings, trademarks, famous pets and people, photo's you shot in a museum and photo's shot at a graveyard, graves- statues, you need to gain permission to use those photo's. Photo's that are shot in a public domein can be used without any problem.

I was surprised to hear that when you shoot graves- statues or cemetary's and use that in something that you need to get permission for that, i always tought that cemetary's were a public domein. Also museum foto's you shoot your self , that you need permission of the museum to use them. To me it sounds silly because you pay to enter it, you shoot photo's (if you may take photo's otherwise you don't shoot them at all ) , then the copyright of the photo is automaticly yours and still you need to gain permission from the museum if you manipulate it and sell the picture makes me wonder if that rule only excist when it is about artist who still are alive or not long death, and that way want to protect their work, but what about the old masters then? Seems sometimes that getting permission from the one who shot the photo isn't enough to stay out of troubles, in these cases

Another thing i was wondering about, The copyright rules are they the same over the whole world or does every continent has its own whit the base and slighty other changes in it?

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Aulruna said:

I always find Sarah Ovenall's (creator of the Victoria Regina Tarot) site on copyright, esp. for collage artists, very helpful and comprehensive:

http://www.funnystrange.com/copyright/index.html

It also comments on the unfortunate situation that copyright laws indeed differ from country to country - sometimes quite heftily!

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baba-prague said:

Actually, any photo you shoot, apart from that of a person, becomes your own copyright. Authorities may try to tell you that you need permission to take a picture of a famous public building, but this is NOT the case. If the building is accessible, you can photograph it. The same applies to things like gravestones.

Museums generally do not allow photography because if they did, the photographers would have copyright over the image they shot and this could erode the museum's profits. We pay to take photos in all the museums we use (except one where we had an exhibition of our work and they allowed us to photograph as a thank-you) but even then, we are not allowed to take high-resolution pictures usually.

The thing to remember is that the person who takes the photo usually (it has been argued in law recently) owns the copyright of that particular photo. So you cannot use a modern book which has photos of old master paintings, for example, because the copyright of each picture is owned by the photographer - even though the artist is long out of copyright. Of course, you see people do just this (scan from recent books) all the time, but it is, in fact, a breach of copyright.

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Azurylipfe said:

The part of scanning from books is 'a not done' thing, i knew, but then i had the question what if the books are more then 100 years old and you own the book, does that still counts? of does the 70 year death show up here?

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Azurylipfe said:

Thank you this sure clears the sky more. When

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baba-prague said:

Yes, if the book is that old it's fine. As far as I know (with all the disclaimers about not being a lawyer etc) the copyright law in the USA and Europe is slightly different here. More or less anything published in the USA before 1923 is out of copyright - regardless of when the artist died. In some other countries the only thing that counts is when the artist died, not when the work was published. There are all sorts of other oddities - some works actually came out of copyright then theoretically went back in when the time that mattered changed from 50 years to 70 years after death - but as a result no-one can really claim copyright on those works.

Generally we try to stick to using very old books (never modern ones) when we take images from print. This gives us far more work with restoration, recolouring etc, but it does mean that we don't have to fret too much about copyright.

As I say, you'll find lots of people here and elsewhere who do scan from recent art books etc. That's their decision. I would be worried about doing that, but that's just my personal attitude.

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