Copying Graphics - What is Fair Use?

it0 asks: "I'm writing a web application and since I can't create good graphics, I'll be ripping them from other places on the web. The decent thing to do would be to ask permission, and at least specify where you got the graphic, however I don't see this happening much on other websites. Here's an example: I copied a trashcan icon that seems to be used by everyone and nobody seems to specify its original source. What about wallpapers? I've see a lot of models without references? I've also seen a lot of images that imitate the Windows GUI, and I've yet to notice anyone getting sued! For those interested, here is more information on the subject."

Comments

You know the answer, right?

[Otter]

The decent thing to do would be to ask permission, and at least specify where you got the graphic...

Well, yeah. Obviously, as you note, ripping some other site's rainbow horizontal line gif or animated pen-writing-on-paper-turns-into-an-envelope is routine, and hardly the same thing as setting up a porn site of copyrighted images served off somone else's server.

But it would be decent to ask, and you may want to really be a good guy and stick to downloading stock images off sites that explicitly give permission. (It's not like there's a shortage of rainbow horizontal line gifs.)

Re:You know the answer, right?

[shepd]

Yah, and gullible isn't in the dictionary.

Show me where in the berne convention pornography is excepted. I've even linked you to the appropriate section. HTH.

Trash Can is Patented

[Anonymous Coward]

We all remember when Apple patented the trash can, right?

Yet another "throw away" patent, if you ask me. ;)

Re:You're kidding, right?

[JofCoRe]

I think he was alluding to the fact that it's not always easy to finger out who exactly the copyright holder is on some of these images. Like the trashcan image that he mentions.... how does one go about finding out who actually created and owns the rights to that image?

use a bibliography of sorts

[miyako]

I'm not sure if using graphics you ripped off other peoples sites is legal under fair use, but either way it seems like kind of a shitty thing to do.
I took a couple of web publishing classes in highschool, where we were required to make all our own graphics or prove that the image we used was in the public domain.
Although I normally make all my own graphics, in the rara occassion that I do use one from someone elses site, I first try to email them and check if it's ok. I then compile a list of any sites I don't get responses from and make sure to list them in a section of a links page with a little thanks and a note saying what graphic I used.
Also make sure that you don't link to the graphic on the persons page, not only is this stealing their bandwidth, but if something happens and the page is gone then you are without your graphic.

--"If I put in my two cents, and it's a penny for my thoughts, do I get change back?" --unknown

Sued

[Catholic]

I've yet to notice anyone getting sued!

Out of curiosity...how did you expect to notice? Cease and desist letters are sent out on a daily basis in any country's legal system. Lawsuits about copyright infringement happen regularly.

Re:Sued

[it0]

I notice that no sites are getting shut down who use GUI from an os. Or sites that have wallpapers from models or artwork. Both are common on the web.

In the same spirit you cannot have a fan site with pictures? I know fan sites have been sued in the past, on the other hand many other fan sites still exist.

Since so many sites seem to get away with it, I thought that perhaps there was a special excemption.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[iCEBaLM]

Fair use is when you have the permission of the author (or copyright holder, if they are not one and the same).

You are wrong.

Fair use is the doctrine allowing the use of copyrighted works, particularly excerpts, for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research".

I turn your attention to USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107.

-- iCEBaLM

take what you can get away with

[Anonymous Coward]

Copy the graphics you need, if they send you a cease and desist or otherwise contact you, take it down immediately and apologize.

If you think nobody does this, you're nuts.

The trashcan icon

[Guspaz]

What do you mean nobody knows the original source? That's the trashcan icon from Mac OS 8+.

Ripping off icons from major OS' is a bad idea. Pleading ignorance to an obvious source doesn't help in the slightest.

Ten Percent

[mcdrewski42]

In Australia, it's normally not a copyright violation if you take some 'artwork' and modify it by at least 10%. HOWEVER, that does not ever apply to trademarked images.
</IANAL>

Quite frankly, though, most artists will still consider that it's still theft of a kind. If you're making money from your application, then you should invest some of it and employ some talented kid who needs money for rent or food or something. You don't really need that new P4 rig yet anyway, do you?

So, for now:

1) If you're building the application, build it so that the artwork can be EASILY slotted in later. (seems obvious, but really design to support a complete facelift. You know about MVC, right?)

2) Maybe browse the web for portfolios, and resumes of people with cool websites and no jobs. Exploit them for low wages and the ability to but real work on their resumes. :)

3) Or, release the app with crappy graphics and a HOWTO and wait for your users to build you a nice pretty interface. :)

Re:You're kidding, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of folks on slashdot who think "fair use" means "do whatever you like as long as you don't make money". I personally think that's what fair use should be, but that's not what it is.

However, you are an interesting opposite. You seem to think that there is NO fair use. What you describe is "copyright law", without fair use.

But even though you put the word "Period." in boldface, that actually is wrong.

Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement. (I hope you don't mind if I just use the punctuation instead writing out the word "period" :-).

For instance, a copyright holder might be a terrible speller. And you want to write a critical article, showing what a terrible speller he is. So you quote from the book he wrote in your article. He then sues you for copyright infringement. You can claim "fair use" as a defense.

There are several things that a judge would consider before accepting a fair use defense, you can do a web search and learn about them.

No, the person asking the question is not going to be able to use a "fair use" defense if he copies somebody else's artwork for his web site. But there is such a thing, and it is possible to sometimes copy parts of a work without permission and without infringing copyright.

And he doesn't have the right to create derivative images either, so your parenthetical comment doesn't add anything.

Thank you, have a nice day.

No, wrong!

[Tom7]

Man, this post is so totally wrong, and convinced that it is so totally right, that you ended up in my enemies bin immediately. That doesn't happen much, but, for god's sake don't sound so completely sure of yourself if you've never actually read the copyright title or even (apparently) a FAQ about it.

Fair use is real, and in fact, it has its own Section in the US Code . Sometimes it is legal to copy a work without permission. It's possible that some uses of copied web graphics could be fair use, but unlikely--most wholesale copying fails one of the four factors (see 17 usc 107).

On the other hand, it's possible that some copying could be ok, since not everything qualifies for copyright. If the work is not sufficiently expressive (like a scrollbar widget, perhaps) then you could very well be in the clear. However, the "look and feel" of a program or OS can be protected by copyright (sadly), meaning that if you copy enough of those uncopyrightable widgets, you could also be in trouble.

Anyway, the best thing to do, as you say, is get permission. I'll bet the GNOME and KDE icons are Free (as in software), so you could probably use those safely, assuming you're doing the right thing and making your app free!

Re:No, wrong!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Man, this post is so totally wrong, and convinced that it is so totally right, ...

I think that's harsh.

A lot of replies have immediately cited US law on the subject, while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the world does not subscribe to such laws, or indeed have anything like the same "fair use" provisions within their intellectual property laws. In the UK, for example, there is very little provision for so-called "fair use", notably including the absence of any automatic legal right to make copies of things for personal use. In other words, for many people reading this, several of the replies to this post were the things that were totally wrong, and yet convinced they are totally right.

Morally speaking, fair use is a dicey proposition. You want to leave freedom for genuine study and criticism of works, but where do you draw the line? As the post everyone's objecting to noted, just because people would like something to be free doesn't mean it actually is, or even should be.

To use a more common example, is letting half a dozen friends all copy a CD I bought fair use (in the English language sense, not the legal one)? If so, then if they each allow half a dozen of their own friends the same privilege, and so on, then after not very many generations at all, everyone in the country has a copy of that CD. You've used a dubious loophole to mass-copy, just as P2P networks infamously do, and deprived the copyright holder of their exclusivity.

Even if you don't like the music industry and its pricing policies, it's hard to argue the same way against a self-employed electronic artist who earns their living designing custom graphics for web sites. And yet, if you decide that fair use should include the principle above, what's to stop someone depriving that artist of his or her livelihood?

So, while obviously US law provides for more fair use than the super-parent post gave credit for, I think that post still made some very valid points. The fact that it's been slammed and modded down so much is symptomatic of how few people around here actually think about why we have intellectual property laws. They aren't the problem with the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc, and they never have been. The problem there is really just plain old monopoly abuse. The principle of intellectual property is sound, and it's in so many legal systems for a good reason that hasn't changed with the advent of the Internet.

The person asking this question clearly knows very well what the answer is already: you should get permission before you copy original graphics on someone else's site, and if you can't get that permission, you shouldn't use them. It's really that simple, and I fail to see how even under US law any fair use provision is remotely applicable.

Re:You're kidding, right?

[Captain Pedantic]

Well, if he can't find who originally created the image and therefore get permission, he has no right to use it, does he?

My experience

[The Clockwork Troll]

I am of the school, "if it's out there and it's generic enough, it's OK to use it."

Actually I used to be worse than that, I used to link to the actual image I wanted to use rather than do the considerably more decent thing which would be to download it and host it on my own server.

I got my comeuppance one day when someone pointed out that a prominent image on my home page had been replaced with an image of somebody's middle finger which superimposed text reading:

That's what you get for stealing my bandwidth

Suffice to say I host all my own images now.

Re:My experience

[orangesquid]

The only problem with antihotlink stuff is generally it goes too far, and stops things like bookmarks, wget, or reload from working (because then there is no Referer). Instead of requiring that Referer matches the proper site, antihotlink stuff should just ensure that Referer does not match any site besides the proper one (because it may not match a site at all!)

(On a side note, things like frames and shockwave are evil for similar reasons... navigation and bookmarking difficulties. what ever happened to a consistent interface? isn't that what we strive for?)

If you rip off my graphics...

[jayrtfm]

If you rip off my graphics.... then can I rip off your code? after all, it's the same thing, they're both just bits...

Why not hook up with an art student who would design the graphics in exchange for a screen credit? or contact schools, as a teacher could use your app as a class project.

Not fair use, originality

[mbstone]

Before you get to the question of what constitutes "fair use," the first step in the copyright law analysis is whether the work that was copied is sufficiently original, in other words a work of authorship, otherwise there is no copyright protection. While copying artwork willy-nilly from the Internet is usually an invitation to be sued, copying a drawing of a mere wastebasket might not be. The trivial case would be copying a drawing of a square or a circle. Neither is copyrightable subject matter. But elaborate on the circle by adding two more circles for ears and a couple of three-fingered hands, and you have Mickey Mouse (or Chuck E. Cheese, I forget which).

I browse /usr/share/icons...

[cliveholloway]

I've used the crystal theme KDE icons all over the web app we're working on (and apparently we employed the icon designer to do other stuff for us, but I don't know what he did).

Many Open Source apps have large image libraries that you can freely use. Just use Kuickshow to find the relevant directory. .02

cLive ;-)

ps - apologies if you're not using Linux - I'm not sorry that you can't access these, I'm just sorry you don't use Linux (to paraphrase Bill Hicks :)

--
Trinity in high heels carrying a whip:
The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism

Get your images from someone giving them away

[Motherfucking Shit]

I'm writing a web application and since I can't create good graphics, I'll be ripping them from other places on the web. The decent thing to do would be to ask permission, and at least specify where you got the graphic

...But the easy thing to do would be to seek out some clip-art or graphic sites who are intentionally making their work available for free use. Google for "free clip art," "free icons," etc. and you'll come up with a treasure trove of usable art.

Re:Get your images from someone giving them away

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Ok, so you're obviously able to search google images for "trash" -- now search the web for "free clip art" instead.
This is a pain, and involves a lot of weeding-out of the popup ads and not-really-free clipart services.
It is WAY more work than searching google images, then right-click-save-image-as.
And it's legal, ethical, and all that boring stuff too.

--

What i do when i see...

[SolemnDragon]

I'm the person who, when i see copyrighted material on similar websites- as happens a LOT in the research that i do- and it obviously was placed on the one much prior to the other, I send an email to both or all parties. I list all of the sites. I describe what is identical, including the location of the uncommon artwork or the word-for-word page info that one of them painstakingly put together and even copyrighted. And i explain that this is up to them to sort out, but that if it's a legitimate use of someone's artwork, maybe they should be cited, and if it's a legitimate use of someone's work, they should probably inlcude a link. I've gotten a lot of thank you notes from people who put their own artwork up on the web only to find it under someone else's name, and from people who put their theories uup for discussion only to see them posted as someone else's, omitting the author and the class in which it was developed, for example an MIT student who was able to get the rival site to shut down... or the woman whose long work on pharmacological components of chamomile had been posted word for word on two other sites.

I aslo have gotten hate mail back from the people who really did steal other people's work, and have seen cases where they simply forgot to cite the source once they had permission- easily fixed, that last one. The hate mail generally consists of, "who made it your business?" or extremely juvenile insults etc. Someone once threatened to sue me for harassment- that would be the one who stole the MIT paper. It's discouraged me from putting my own work on the web, to be honest, both my artwork AND my own research. I suppose i'll get over that. But in the meantime, i think that the appropriate thing for me to do is to always point out where i feel that there's serious copyright issues, as when what's obviously someone's signed artwork has been cropped to delete the sig and posted as a website element on another site.

Incidentally, i started doing this because an artist friend had exactly that happen to her artwork- the images of oil and acrylic paintings up for SALE on her site were copied and used. Cease and desist letters work, especially if you have evidence of copyright and cc the ISP, etc.

Do yourself a favor.

[nycroft]

Please, for your own sake, if you cannot create the art yourself, find somebody. Taking art from other site is not only against the law (in most cases), but it's just plain lazy. What happens when someone recognizes the images? Will you be proud of the fact that someone else's stuff is on your site? Will you give the original artist credit?

This isn't like having an illegally obtained MP3 on your hard drive. Your web site will be out there for everyone to see! Take it from somebody who knows what it's like to be ridiculed for being lazy with his web site. Make your own stuff. You will be happier in the long run that your site is 100% yours. You can show it off with pride.

Wish I could, all I got is my stupid golf blog. I just used a standard template. You think I'm proud of it? No. I am not. But once I get my art made and my site totally re-done, then it'll be something I can use to pick up chicks!

Royalty Free/PD

[weeeeed]

Instead of using images.google.com, why do you not go to websites specialized on this topic?

Go to dmoz.org and browse through the categories a little bit, you will come up with following categories:

• Photography: Stock: Royalty Free
• Graphics: Clip Art: Public Domain
• Graphics: Clip Art

• also check here

All you have to do now is to browse through the sites and have a peek at the license. Mostly you will have to give them some credit somewhere. If it is not clear from the license if you can use the images in a free software then contact the archive owner directly.

You do not get automatically right to use some image on your site/app only because everybody else is doing it.