How does copyright law apply to reusing images from before the 1900s? I'd like to create some original art using images from art history. Let's keep the question widely applicable and say that I might be interested in anything from old paintings and engravings to pen and ink magazine art to early photography, but all of it would be pre-1900s. Many of the images I'm interested in go back much further, all the way to the late 1500s. I live in the United States, but might want to source images from overseas. Presumably the copyright holders for these images are all long expired, and if I've got things right because they predated the copyright law enacted in the early 1900s these images should all be in the public domain. A quick google and a perusal of some art books tells me it isn't that simple. Image archives, whether online or in photo book form, generally appear to make a copyright claim on the images they contain. This makes my want to get a generally more robust idea of what I can and can't do with art historical and early photographic images before I go any further. My question is, what should I know about copyright law and using images that were created prior to the 1900s? What is the best legal practice for reusing images like that in original artwork?
You don't seem to be distinguishing properly between "original artwork" and photographs of it. A 19th-century painting will be out of copyright, so you can set up an easel copy it yourself, or even take a photo if the owners don't mind; your copy can be used however you please. However, other people can't use your photograph without your permission. Similarly, if you want to reuse a photograph used in an art book, the important thing is the copyright on the photograph, not the painting.
There are several legal issues regarding this kind of image manipulation. Copyright The first is Copyright. From the description, the modified images are derivative works. Making or distributing derivative works requires the permission of the holder of the copyright on the original (source) work. Some open source licenses (such as the Creative Commons licenses that do not include an ND clause) grant such permission in advance. Otherwise permission must be requested from, and granted by, the copyright holder or the holder's agent. In the absence of permission this is copyright infringement. If advertised widely for a fee, a copyright suit is more likely, and might result in sizable damages. The holder might not grant permission, or might charge a fee. A lack of any answer from the holder must be treated as a &quot;no&quot;. Right of Publicity In some jurisdictions a person has a &quot;right of publicity&quot; in his or her own image or likeness. This generally means that photos or images of the person cannot be used commercially without permission from the subject. In some places this right is limited to the use of such images in advertising, not as art subjects themselves. I don't know the extent of such rights in England and Wales, or elsewhere in the UK. In the US this varies by state. But if such rights apply, use of such images without permission can result in a suit and significant damages. Defamation If showing an image of a person with added tattoos would tend to bring that person into disrepute, or make others think badly of that person, for example if the added tattoos were Nazi or gang symbols, then distributing such an altered image might be defamation. This would only apply if people actually thoguht the tattoos indicated that person's choice or attitude, or if reasonable people might think so. Conclusion Before making this a business, even a hobby business, one would do well to consult a lawyer with IP expertise. There are significant legal risks here, which are increased by doing this for profit, and advertising it on the net. It might well be that in many cases appropriate permissions can be obtained free or cheaply, but it is not safe to assume this.
Check your license from shutterstock what you are allowed to do with these images. They allow you, for appropriate payment, to publish their original images on your website. There is no reason why you couldn't ask them for a license to create an image derived from their original and publish it on your website. Anyway, according to your description, you created a derived work of the shutterstock images. Which is copyright infringement unless your license from shutterstock allows this. You have of course copyright on your modifications, but shutterstock also has a copyright on your work, because it is derived from theirs. If you have no license to create a derived work, then publishing it makes the situation worse. To answer your question: Legally, by getting an appropriate license. Illegally, by creating a work with so little similarity that you are not suspected.
No you don't. There are two copyright holders regarding the derivative work: yourself, for creating the original. the other artist, for creating the modified version. The other artist has received the right to use your original through the CC-BY license, under the condition that they attribute you appropriately. However, you have not received any rights to the other artist's work.
If you create a new work that is derived from or based on someone else's work, it is a derivative work, and you cannot do so without permission from the original copyright holder. If the original work is made available under a CC-BY_SA 4.0 license, you have permission, but it comes with conditions. One of those is that you must attribute the original work -- you must say what work yours is based on and who created it. Another is that you must license your own derived work under the same CC-BY-SA license (or a compatible one). This does not mean that your work is not copyrighted -- it is. But it does mean that you must grant to others the same rights that the creator of the work you used granted to you. That is what the "share alike" or SA part of the license means. if you don't like that, you should not use a work licensed under CC-BY-SA terms to create your own work. If you publish your work but fail to grant that license to others, you are infringing the copyright of the work you used, and could be sued. Note that if you had created a compilation rather than a derived work -- for example if you created an album of images from various sources, some of them under CC-BY-SA licenses, you would retain a copyright on the collection as a whole, and that would not have to be under CC-BY-SA. But in this case you say that you used the other person's image as a background for your own illustration. That is creating an "adapted" or derivative work, i am fairly sure, and invokes the share alike clause of the license. You might also want to consider the different case mentioned in If I include an unmodified CC-BY-SA work in a book, does the whole book have to be CC-BY-SA?
No. (Therefore no). Not necessarily. Yes. Is there a fair use for patents? No. "Fair use" is a affirmative defense for copyright infringement. The issue is that patents cover an design, idea or methodology, while copyright covers an "artistic" work. For example, if he were alive and working today, van Gogh would have copyright over his collection of paintings. If he developed a special paintbrush to make his distinctive style, he could patent the design for that brush. There is no obligation to make a patent available, much less at a "fair rate". And there is no obligation for a patent holder to make their patent available (so yes, they can block you directly or indirectly). There are various rationales for this. One is that a patent holder's historical reward for producing a new invention, a furtherance of common knowledge, is that that individual would receive an exclusive monopoly on the manufacture and sale of that invention. Often, this would serve as a way to recoup investment in new development and an incentive to experiment and expand the knowledge base of a country. This arrangement in the modern day is most closely represented by the exclusive license agreement, in which the licensor (in this case the patent holder) agrees to not only give the licensee the legal right to use the patent holder the legal ability to use their patent, but also agrees to limitations in what other people are granted that legal ability, in exchange for compensation.
The code is copyrighted. You are not given any permission to use or copy any part of it, nor to create a derivative work based on it. There is no way for you to "make the copyright null". The code was copyrighted in 2005, and the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the death of the author, under US law. The period would vary in some other countries, but in no country that I know of will it expire in the next few years. That the author is dead, or the publisher out of business, does not change this legally. Someone, probably the author's heir, or perhaps whoever bought the remains of the publisher's business, will own the copyright. However, the ideas and programming techniques shown and discussed in the book are not protected, and you may use them freely to write programs, commercial or non-commercial. You need not even acknowledge the book as a source of ideas, although to do so would be nice. Of course, since the author is dead and the publisher not active, if you were to infringe the copyright by copying code from thsi book, there is a reasonable chance that no one would notice, but if someone did notice, the current owner of the copyright could sue you for infringement, and could perhaps win sizable damages. It would be safer to write your own original code using only the general ideas from the book. In future, do not ever assume that you can just take someone else's code (or other creative work, such as a book) and reuse it without permission, unless it is in the public domain, for example because it was published before 1923.
Copyright law is a country-by-country matter. Most countries are signatories to the Berne Convention, which provides a common framework, but there are still variations, generally in the duration of copyright or the definition of copyrightable material. According to the Hirtle chart, a video game that was first published in Europe in the year 2000 and subsequently published in the United States is still copyrighted in both the United States and whichever European countries it was published in. It is likely to be a work of corporate authorship, so the US copyright will expire on January 1, 2096 (unless a law extending the duration is passed). In the United States, the requirement to register a copyright was eliminated in 1989 as part of the Berne Convention Implementation Act; registration still provides benefits when filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Most European countries eliminated their registration requirements much earlier, if they had them at all: the Berne Convention dates from 1887. Copyright does not simply cease to exist when the owner does, or if the owner cannot be determined. The difficulty of tracking down copyright holders for old or little-known works is the driving force behind orphaned works legislation. There are no orphaned works laws in the United States, and since copyright is country-by-country, European laws won't help you if you're interested in publishing in the US. In order to track down the copyright holder, you'll need to figure out who originally held the copyright (probably the publisher, but it could be either development company, or both, or the game might be a collective work of the individuals who worked on it). If it was a work of corporate authorship, and none of the game-copyright sales mention it, copyright will have been transfered when the company owning the copyright was sold (as part of a general "and all intellectual property" clause).