I've had to learn way more about copyright law than I ever wanted because I got into producing royalty free stock illustrations for an international company. Dealing with the copyright side of my work often takes much more time than the actual work.
Since it is a truly international company, contributors have to abide by ALL international copyright laws, which means that we wind up having to follow a set of rules that are much stricter than those of any single country. Let's say that countries A through Y consider a sketch made by an artist of an existing work of art to be an original work of art. However, country Z considers this to be copyright infringement, therefore no artists contributing to this company can sell sketches of an existing work of art. OK, fine, but multiply that by about 1978302187091, and you'll get some idea of the thorniness of the situation. Even if I create a work of art without reference to absolutely anything including live models, in my own uninfluenced style, I am still open to prosecution in some countries if the end result reminds someone of some work of art they saw somewhere. An examination of previous copyright infringement lawsuits indicates that to be legally safe, artists should simply never ever ever look at anyone else's artwork, period, because if they can prove that you reasonably could have seen the existing work of art (not DID, but could have) then you are screwed. Now, I want to protect my intellectual property. I've had it stolen in the past, and I didn't like it. I put in the painfully time-consuming research time to make sure that I'm not violating copyright. But I read the draconian copyright laws that my fellow artists either A) want to implement or B) incorrectly think have already been implemented, and it makes me want to find another business entirely. Many--not all, but many--basically take the attitude that if anyone so much as thinks about their artwork, much less sees it, they should get a whopping big payment for it. It's insane, and it's killing art. Traditionally, artists have been encouraged to look at as much art as possible. While being trained, we're told to copy this painting or that style, to get a feel for how it was done. This has been going on for centuries, and has produced great works of art. If you study--even very off-handedly--the artists that, for example, we costume people spend a lot of time with, like Holbein or Duerer or Da Vinci, you'll find that they were copying each other left and right. This does not mean that the product of that copying was any less an original work of art. This does mean that by today's standards, every single great artist for the past umpteen number of centuries has been a copyright violator, and in today's courts would be metaphorically drawn and quartered for it. It makes me want to heave. -E House _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
