I have start­ed to look into copy­right a lit­tle bit more. I have had a strug­gle. I think it would be clear­er if it was­n’t the big cor­po­ra­tions  and com­pa­nies with big legal mess­es and the inter­net was­n’t such a huge access every­thing place. Which is some­thing I appre­ci­ate about it.

Artists cre­ate and then what. Who owns their work? What can be done with their work? How does dif­fer­ent media change this; video, audio, paint­ing, draw­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, ani­ma­tion, writing?

Image by mohamed Has­san from Pix­abay

I found the doc­u­men­tary  RiP! A Remix Man­i­festo by Brett Gay­lor an intrigu­ing insight into 21st cen­tu­ry cul­ture. Some­thing that was said that real­ly struck a cord with me was when we write a paper we are allowed to use oth­ers ideas as long as we cite them. Why should­n’t we be allowed to do that with oth­er forms of art? Isn’t it pro­mo­tion of your art? Would­n’t it cause more peo­ple to find it? I see some­one using por­tions of oth­ers work and turn­ing it into some­thing else through a com­plex process, but I can also see if I made an icon why I might not want some­one mis­rep­re­sent­ing it into some­thing I don’t want asso­ci­at­ed with it.

Is it ok to use some­thing that’s copy­right­ed only for your­self, what about teach­ing mate­r­i­al? What hap­pens if you alter it? How much do you need to alter it to be con­sid­ered yours? What about ask­ing per­mis­sion? What if you can’t find the orig­i­nal or you have and you haven’t received a response from the creator?

My own strug­gle ties into how I make my own art and my pho­to ref­er­ences. I am going to be more aware of who owns the orig­i­nal image of my ref­er­ences and find pub­lic domain images or cre­ative com­mons licens­es on images. This will change my art process. It will change how I find inspi­ra­tion and how I con­duct search­es. I often use Pin­ter­est and some­times Insta­gram, but I am going to try not to from now on.

In my free inquiry project I am using found images and cre­at­ing based off of those. At this stage in the game I’m still unclear if I can post my ref­er­ence pho­tos and even my final images. I know legal­ly I should­n’t unless I do a lot of dig­ging into the ori­gins and then I still might not be ok. I may be able to form an argu­ment about it being doc­u­men­ta­tion for edu­ca­tion pur­pos­es. I am reach­ing into this deep­er and I will update you when I have more infor­ma­tion. Worst comes to worse the begin­ning of my project might not be avail­able for pub­lic posting.