By yours truly. This is a cursory glance on copyright, including what it is and what you can do. You only need to know more if you are a pr0fessional or deal with model releases. I will, however, continue adding to it as questions and situations arise. Feel free to place any inquiries you want as I am perfectly willing to research them for you. I'd paste the whole thing in here, but I don't want to deal with putting the bold and italics back in, so this is what you get. Feel free to share. My only stipulation is that you link back to the original article (you may paste it on a site, just place a link somewhere visible). I like to be notified if my stuff is all over the internets, but that step is not necessary.
Very nice You should add creative commons as well. And perhaps that an easy way on getting copyright on a text you wrote for example is to send it to yourself, adressed and signed. That way you'll have proof that you made it and you can show the date and all if someone would decide to steal it (and then you can effectively take it to court ^^)
Sad but true I'll look into creative commons and maybe write a separate article on it . I know less about it, so I'll have to do more research.
At least twice I'm sure. The way I see it is as long as your not making money off of it, official public sites (like for video games, tv, etc.) don't really care if you use their stuff for personal use(I count sites like Deviantart as private sites because most everyone there makes their work without any real help). Even Dangeruss(from deviantart, the guy who did the cover art for PGR4 and Forza 2) said as far as he is concerned your just advertising his stuff for free when you do that. I guess it's a good thing for people to want to follow the law to the letter, but whateverz....
Yeah, I ignore copyright for large companies. They will never file a suit because they'd lose money for that. What I wrote is just straight up the law, not when it's okay to circumvent the law or anything like that. Even fan art is copyright infringement, yet the people who made the original art don't care, so why should I? It's more when it's private work, not citing who created it, or just outright claiming it as your own that I hate...
I think the rules should be changed to simply this: If you steal someone elses work and claim it as your own and/or sell it, you are infringing copyright. That means if someone tries to claim they made it/own it or they try and sell it they can get sued. Who'd waste money to sue someone that uses it in a design to show to everyone when they get credited for it?
It's not just about wasting money. It's mostly just about respecting the people who made it and shutting up the people who say they're not doing anything wrong. There are certain things of mine that I don't want to see in other designs unless you have my written expressed permission, and there's quite a few people who agree with me. Then there's the people who make actual money from their work and it gets stolen and used in designs. If it were me, I'd be doing what I can to stop them, and if they don't stop, I just might take them to court (depending on costs).
