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Artistic Licenses : For those who create, own and steal images online

Last week we saw Jamime Thomas, a single mother of two losing an online piracy case paying 220K for uploading 24 songs onto an online file sharing site.In this digital age of World Wide Web, emergence of a plethora of Image Search Engines has enabled users to search for digital images, photos, etc and copy them to your local hard disk. However you must not forget the fact that many of the pictures easily available online, are highly protected by various copyright laws and you could be prosecuted or fined heavily just for downloading and using those pictures. Given all these, we need to make sure the pictures we download from net are really “FREE”?

How to ensure “FREE”ness

If you own a website and is in the habit of searching and picking up images to beautify your site, you should be careful. You need to know whether the content is copyright protected or copyleft. The following steps will help you in doing so.

Locate the Copyright Statements

Before copying and using images from any site we must look for Copyright statements for the site. Unless the statement says that the images are free for use you should not copy or use them. There are a number of “Free Licenses” which allows users, fully or partial usage of the content. Some of the most important ones are discussed later in this article.This is a perfect sample for a Free Image Site: http://www.2learn.ca/copyright/images.html#1
More can be found here: Free Images For your Website

Hints for locating the Copyright link

If you are not a “regular copyright statement seeker”, the following links will help you in locating it.

1. All Rights Reserved
2. Read Me
3. Who are We
4. Copyright and Privacy
5. Contact Us
6. Site Info
7. About Us
8. Terms of Use

Absence of Copyright

Absence of Copyright Statements does not mean No Copyright. Many websites do not have copyright statements. This in no sense means that you can copy and use the images. All intellectual properties belong to the author or the creator and unless clearly stated you cannot use them even they are accessible in public domain. Even if the site clearly says all the images are free for use, it is the users responsibility to make sure that the contents are original and truly belong to the site.


Popular Licenses for Artistic works and Images on Web

Sites providing FREE content usually adopt a well known “Public License”. Most of such licenses are formalized to protect both the creator and the users of the content. The following are the most popular licenses used by FREE content providing web sites.

1. Creative Commons(http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses)

The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending on the one chosen has different levels of restrictions. They have a number of variations of the license and details of each of the licenses can be found here .

Creative Commons licenses which are very different and to say that a work “uses a Creative Commons license” doest not mean that the work is “Free”.You must look for which type of Creative Commons license is used.

These are the various CC licenses as per current date

Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, allowing redistribution. It allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Attribution (by)

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

2. GNU General Public License(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)

The GNU GPL can be used for general data, which is not software, as long as one can determine what the definition of “source code” refers to in the particular case. As it turns out, the DSL (see below) also requires that you determine what the “source code” is, using approximately the same definition that the GPL uses.
Official statement goes like:

“You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force. You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you”


3. Design Science License (DSL)(http://www.gnu.org/licenses/dsl.html)

Design Science License (DSL) is a copyleft license for free content such as text, images, and music. The DSL was written by Michael Stutz.Under this license, permission is granted to distribute, publish or otherwise present verbatim copies of the entire Source Data of the Work, in any medium, provided that full copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty, where applicable, is conspicuously published on all copies, and a copy of this License is distributed along with the Work.
Permission is granted to distribute, publish or otherwise present copies of the Object Form of the Work, in any medium, under the terms for distribution of Source Data above and also provided that one of the following additional conditions are met:
(a) The Source Data is included in the same distribution, distributed under the terms of this License; or
(b) A written offer is included with the distribution, valid for at least three years or for as long as the distribution is in print (whichever is longer), with a publicly-accessible address (such as a URL on the Internet) where, for a charge not greater than transportation and media costs, anyone may receive a copy of the Source Data of the Work distributed according to the section above; or
(c) A third party’s written offer for obtaining the Source Data at no cost, as described in paragraph (b) above, is included with the distribution. This option is valid only if you are a non-commercial party, and only if you received the Object Form of the Work along with such an offer.
You may copy and distribute the Work either gratis or for a fee, and if desired, you may offer warranty protection for the Work.
The aggregation of the Work with other works that are not based on the Work — such as but not limited to inclusion in a publication, broadcast, compilation, or other media — does not bring the other works in the scope of the License; nor does such aggregation void the terms of the License for the Work.


4. Free Art License(http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/)

With this Free Art License, you are authorised to copy, distribute and freely transform the work of art while respecting the rights of the originator.This license can be applied to digital as well as to non-digital art. You can freely distribute the copies of these works, modified or not, whatever their medium, wherever you wish, for a fee or for free, if you observe all the following conditions:
- attach this license, in its entirety, to the copies or indicate precisely where the license can be found,
- specify to the recipient the name of the author of the originals,
- specify to the recipient where he will be able to access the originals (original and subsequent). The author of the original may, if he wishes, give you the right to broadcast/distribute the original under the same conditions as the copies.
It was born out of observation of the world of free software and the Internet, but its applicability is not limited to the digital media. You can put a painting, a novel, a sculpture, a drawing, a piece of music, a poem, an installation, a video, a film, a recipe, a CD-rom, a Web site, or a performance under the Free Art License, in short any creation which has some claim to be a work of art.

Apart from the well-known licenses there are many licenses used by various sites. You must make sure you read the full Copyright statements for a site before "Stealing" images ....


Conclusion

Know about Copyright Laws and Public Licenses restrictions before you search, copy and use images to make sure that you don’t end up in any unwanted legal soup.

Resources

Image Search Engines
Official US Copyright
Famous Copyright Court Cases

posted by Evening Moon @ 8:25 PM