Making Your Own Art Prints 0

[vodou]

Don't for a second believe that "IP" as a concept is universal settled science. It is not. Lawyers, for a fee or fame or both, can try to be the little Dutch boy and plug the hole in the dam but eventually the dam will break. Laws change but always lag the ethical sentiment of the day. Watch...IP as "a thing" will end...and will even be laughed about one day.

 

[Carlo M]

Excuse I  am no US lawyer but what is the difference between looking at an image on your computer in your home and looking at the same image nicely printed hanging on your wall in your home?

[delekkerste]

Also, if the laws were as strict as some are suggesting, how is CAF allowed to exist?  

What about all the people here who freely admit to framing copies of their art and then storing the real art in a safe or safe deposit box? 

Surely there are no copyright infringement issues with either...

 

[ESeffinga]

Life is all about those gray areas.

Its not legal to do 60 in a 55 mph zone, but most policemen don’t pull people over for it.

There are many MANY examples where there are laws, and there is enforcement of these laws, but not always to the letter. Too often the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, as they say.

If you bought Madonna’s Like a Virgin for yourself, and made yourself a mix tape to skate to, that’s “fair use”, and no worries. But if you also made your girl a mix tape and threw a song or two on there from that album, technically it’s not, and therefore illegal. But no one in their right mind is going after anyone for that. 

If you copy a piece you own and keep it for posterity, frame it, use it for insurance records, etc. But I’m pretty sure it’s all fair use. If you make prints out of it and give them away, that’s wading into the gray zone. If you start selling them, you are breaking the law, but in reality ... just like speeding, the volume of the infraction will determine how much attention you raise and the probability you are going to get called on it.

So while “illegal”, you could take a piece of art. Put it on a shirt and sell it on the street. If you live in Bumsville, Nebraska and no one there knows anything about the art, chances are no one will care (or buy your shirts). But all it takes is for the right person(s) to notice, and then the jig is up.

Artists can skirt legal issues because of the gray zone. All those Superman commissions they don’t own the IP for. DC doesn’t have resources to track that all down. They have financial worries of their own, they don’t need to be chasing down folks who are drawing Batman & Dr Who team up commission for one fan, when huge exploitative web T-shirt companies are constantly selling Calvin Batman & Hobbes type shirts for $15 on countless shirt sites. 

In some Industries and for many creatives, it’s death by 1,000 cuts. Sure, I can print out a piece by a living artist from a web photo, and no one will ever know. I can frame it right up and suffer no legal recourse. But if that artist has their piece downloaded by everyone all over the world, all hung in their own homes, they are now world famous and don’t make a dime off of their work.

so there is a difference between what is legal and what is “right”. The moral conundrum. Thing is, if it’s something I enjoy enough to hang it up, stick on a mug or otherwise make use of in my life, I’d rather compensate the artist if I can. So they can make a living. Make more art. And make my life richer for it.

So often in society we want our cake and eat it too. Why buy the song, when we can swipe it off the net for free?

 

Going mostly off topic, here’s a little something I’ll call Skateboarding, or having Fun with Copyright Law

In the early 90s a skateboarder named Steve Rocco started to really push the envelope of what was legal/illegal in product manufacturing. He founded a company he called World Industries. A name that made them sound huge, though it was really just a handful of rowdy skaters making fun of what had become a truly corporate scene. 

It’s a long long history, with a number of brands that still exist today, though only a shadow of what they once were. But at the beginning they started off doing graphics on their boards that were considered parody and transformative. But eventually they got bolder and bolder. To the point of printing images straight out of magazines, art books, etc. 

And for a couple years afterward, much of the industry followed suit. Including the big corporate brands. 

What Rocco figured out was that skateboards were meant to be ridden and destroyed (by and large), things moved so fast as trends, that they could make a really big stink by printing 100, 350, 500 boards with someone else’s image. Star Wars photos. Gibson Guitars. Kiss photos.  Explicit porno stills and pinups. You name it.

And by the time the big mega corporations that owned these properties caught on and sent World Industries their Cease and Desist notices, they had already long since stopped and moved on to pirating the next thing. It very much made the early 90s skate industry a period like the Wild West, and it was creatively flush with amazing pieces, as well as these other gambits meant to stick a finger in the eye of authority. Very little was taken very seriously, and they flaunted it.  They also made a ton of money, and did insane things with it. 

When the mainstream skate magazines like Thrasher and Transworld Skateboarding started refusing to publish his ads, Rocco started his own skateboard magazine called Big Brother. It was also groundbreaking in some creative but also the most infantile, shocking and hilarious ways. He knew what 14-22 year old skateboarders wanted to read and look at, and it was about skating, but also porn stars, and insane nonsense.  

This magazine in turn published an article by a guy named Johnny Knoxville, about being shot with a gun, and hence  jacka55 was born. Big Brother was eventually sold to Flint Enterprises, and it started to become corporate itself, due to legal threats. World Industries was eventually also sold to a corporate entity and eventually skateboarding went back to less legal flaunting. Etc and so on.

I left out one fun tidbit. About 10 years ago a company popped up named Cease and Desist. They were reprinting/producing copies of the most notorious of the 90s skateboards as “limited editions”. They have since folded, but you can still find some of them on eBay. AND those old disposable boards... the originals. Well, like with comics and such, the ones that have survived have nostalgic value now. Fetching 4, and in some cases 5 figures.

 

There are a couple documentaries about the topic floating around out there. The most concise might be The Man Who Souled the World. 

 

Edited September 7, 2019 by ESeffinga

[Rick2you2]

11 hours ago, Carlo M said:

Excuse I  am no US lawyer but what is the difference between looking at an image on your computer in your home and looking at the same image nicely printed hanging on your wall in your home?

You made a physical duplicate of it. It isn’t the act of looking, it is the reproduction which matters.

[Rick2you2]

I have been reading the comments since my earlier post, and I wanted to add some more information.

The most important "exception" mentioned is by ESeffinga about enforceability, not legal violation. Companies will generally not pursue a trivial violation (more likely to do so, however, if the copyright was registered) because it isn't worth the effort. Be really careful if it is also a trademark violation, however.

Regarding the following comment by Bill (wno similarly noted the jaywalking exception) (But, I once got a ticket for standing off the curb in Washington DC, so, it could happen):

9 hours ago, Bill C said:

I think people here sometimes go too far with the technical legal ramifications (I hope they have never jaywalked).

If you print out a cool image from HA or ComicLink on an 11" x 17" board and throw it in your portfolio, I dont think it's a big deal. 

I just got a Spanish hardcover today- GOTG Volume 2- and they "borrowed" almost every image in the introduction from my collection on CAF! lol. I would have given them nicer scans, but they didn't ask (they did this for GOTG Volume 1 also).

Copying screenshots is a violation of copyright law, except by the auctioneers who have permission from the piece's owner, and with some rare exceptions under fair use. Whether anyone will bother you is a different question.

And as to the Spanish hardcover book, Bill has a limited (derivative) copyright to what was borrowed, so permission was not needed from him. He just has ownership of a physical reproduction of those pages. The original copyright would be owned by either the artist, publisher, or some other transferee.

Regarding "fair use", that is a defense to a claim of copyright infringement, not a standalone right. In other words, you reproduce without permission, it is a copyright violation, but, the person claiming fair use may establish something you might think of as an immunity to damages. More technically, the person asserting fair use has the legal "burden of proof", and if they don't meet it, they are liable.

"Fair use" is not as flexible a term as you might think. There is a statute defining it with four factors for courts to consider: their application depends on the facts. For example, is the use "transformative" of the orginal work, like parody, does it involve criticism of the original work, is it copied for educational purpose (narrow interpretaton), and is it for commercial or non commercial purposes. You could probaby make a copy of a page you own for your own personal use if kept in the same form (not printed on a T shirt), but an argument could still be made that it is not fair use because of the strictures of the law. Sorry. On the other hand, if no one is around to challenge the use, it doesn't matter, now does it?

Luckily, most of what we do is too small to attract the ire of large companies. Just don't distribute it to make a buck or essentially deprive a company or artist or the right to make one and you are probably okay.

[ESeffinga]

This reminds me of another comment someone asked, and that is regarding CAF, and Bill Cox’s legal standing.

Its so big now, I have to think DC or Marvel/Disney could easily go after the site and at the very least force it to shut down, due to the volume of their work on there.  Legally speaking.

They don’t, because let’s be honest. The optics would be bad for business. Attacking a fan based group for nothing more than showing their fandom and celebrating their imagery.

Bill could try and argue the “educational” or journalistic aspects of the site, though that’d be a tough one, I think. The lawyers in the room would certainly know more than I. But my feeling is it’s a live and let live scenario. 

But if a day ever came where those brands wanted to, or ever felt it was some sort of financial or brand-weakening threat, it could go down in a heartbeat. Not sure what that scenario could be, if I’m honest, but there it is.

CAF was founded as a fan site, at a time  when people didn’t really think so much about these topics and the ramifications they can have globally and societally.

Putting that cat back in the bag gets harder and harder, the bigger it gets. Or conversely, it becomes a bigger target that is easier to see.

[Carlo M]

2 hours ago, Rick2you2 said:

You made a physical duplicate of it. It isn’t the act of looking, it is the reproduction which matters.

 

2 hours ago, Rick2you2 said:

You made a physical duplicate of it. It isn’t the act of looking, it is the reproduction which matters.

Interesting legal nuisance , but in a way makes sense 

[Rick2you2]

8 hours ago, ESeffinga said:

This reminds me of another comment someone asked, and that is regarding CAF, and Bill Cox’s legal standing.

Its so big now, I have to think DC or Marvel/Disney could easily go after the site and at the very least force it to shut down, due to the volume of their work on there.  Legally speaking.

They don’t, because let’s be honest. The optics would be bad for business. Attacking a fan based group for nothing more than showing their fandom and celebrating their imagery.

Bill could try and argue the “educational” or journalistic aspects of the site, though that’d be a tough one, I think. The lawyers in the room would certainly know more than I. But my feeling is it’s a live and let live scenario. 

But if a day ever came where those brands wanted to, or ever felt it was some sort of financial or brand-weakening threat, it could go down in a heartbeat. Not sure what that scenario could be, if I’m honest, but there it is.

CAF was founded as a fan site, at a time  when people didn’t really think so much about these topics and the ramifications they can have globally and societally.

Putting that cat back in the bag gets harder and harder, the bigger it gets. Or conversely, it becomes a bigger target that is easier to see.

I don't thnk they would want to for another reason: publicity for their product. After Andy Warhol painted his Campbell's Soup Can and made it into a famous painting, Campbells sent him a letter thanking him for the publicity. He helped make their mundane Tomato Soup into an icon.

On the other hand, if someone copies a picture and incorporates it into another picture, it better have been transformative of the original which makes it different. Otherwise, one artist ends up suing another. As I recall, a rapper got sued, and lost, when he used someone's picture on a CD cover.

 

 

 

[Brian Peck]

My original comment was in regards to the original poster going to EZprints.com and paying them to reproduce it. I know some people who have had issues with Kinko's refusing to cake copies of original art people bring in. Book publishers have exemption if the work is reference or educational they can use the images on the inside of the book. Covers of the book are a bit trickier. Best option is just to buy a good printer and print the artwork for yourself so you are not involving any other entity.