Is this copyright or not? Help please!?

Question

I thinks that's spelled right...I'm not sure. Anyway, I'm a deviantART user. What I do is I take other people's art of one character from a show, and I put them all together to make this collage thing. My sister told me that it's copyright, and that she was going to report it unless I deleted them. So what I was originally going to do was make a new account and post them on there so that she wouldn't know. But then I thought to myself, "Wait, what if this really is copyright?" I thought that my sister was just trying to get me in trouble or she was jealous or something. So I looked at the Submission Policy/ Terms of Use for the site. It stated:

"As and when Artist Materials are uploaded to the deviantART Site(s), Artist grants to deviantART a worldwide, license to display, copy, reproduce, exhibit, publicly perform, broadcast, rebroadcast, transmit, retransmit, distribute through any electronic means (including analog and digital) or other means, and electronically or otherwise publish any or all of the Artist Materials, including any part of them, and to include them in compilations for publication, by any and all means."

I'm almost totally sure this means that if I post something, it means that other people can take it, manipulate it, repost it, etc. But I'm no lawyer and I'm not completely sure. Anyone help? Is this copyright?

Example of what I do (I did not draw/paint/etc. any of these pictures, I just found them by browsing): http://brunetteangel72.deviantart.com/art/Ino-Tribute-95298160

Answer 1

If you found them online simply browsing, these are arguably in the public domain. In addition, you have changed them, adding your own art to the mix. They'd have a tough time prosecuting you just as Shakespeare would have a tough time prosecuting the filmmakers of West Side Story over Romeo and Juliet http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php... At a certain point there are no new stories, said the bard.

That said, however, copyright exists in every work and creators have the right to be identified as such with their work. We give the work up to publishers in return for a profit. The fight, then, is who publishes the thing first, which is why many of us advise clients against posting their unpublished material for all the world to see (and steal, of course). If it's in the public domain, it's fair game - within reason. The fight only gets interesting when profit is involved.

Here's an intro to a terrific book about intellectual property protections by Kembrew McLeod if you want to look into the matter further. See http://pokerpulse.com/legal/viewtopic.ph... This is the guy who trademarked the expression, freedom of expression, to prove a point. It's an excellent treatise and covers the same issues you raise but with rap music.  

Answer 2

Two different questions.

First, what you are doing does violate the copyright of the person who originally drew the pictures. While there is a "fair use" exemption to the prohibition on copying someone else's artwork without their permission, it covers things like reviews, or 'incidental use'. Taking half a dozen - copyright - pictures and putting them onto one frame doesn't apply.

Second, DeviantARTs Policy doesn't mean that "other people" can take it and repost it - it means that the site owners can. They could, for example, publish a book of your pictures and sell it, and you'd have nothing to say in the matter.

The big problem with that is that the copyright owners would then probably sue DA for such a commercial use of their art, and DA would turn around and sue you.

Richard

Answer 3

close but not quite.

if means by posting there, you grant deviantArt (and no one else) the right ("license") to transmit the picture as needed to operate the site or for other purposes such as a book about the site.

it does not grant an exclusive license, nor does it grant a license to anyone else of any sort.

as for your collage, yes, that is clearly a derivative work of the pieces you copied.

in that sense, it is certainly a candidate for a violation.

your only defenses are these:

- you have a license to copy from the copyright holder (apparently not)

- your work falls under Fair Use (maybe, maybe not, requires a lot more detail then you provided, and a lot less bias then you are likely to apply to the matter)

See wikipedia articles on copyright and fair use for a good start.

In short, you probably should NOT be creating the art and certainly not distributing it until you are 100% certain.

My own feeling is you should not dismiss your sister's concerns out of hand.

Also, your works can be taken down by DA if they are served a DMCA notice by the copyright owner who alleges you infringed, see chillingeffects.org for how that works

Answer 4

That's the way it appears.  You can use their stuff and somebody else can use yours.  But I'm not a lawyer either.  There could be some kind of legalese mumbo jumbo double talk that puts an entirely different twist on it the terms of use.