Use Me, Baby
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012
Question: Can you use my art for this thing you want to do?
Answer: Maybe!
Useful, huh? Well, maybe not.
Let me elaborate.
First off, everything I make is under copyright. Everything any artist makes is under copyright, unless they’ve specifically stated it’s not, or they’ve been dead long enough for it to expire.
That said, I’ve put most art on this site under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. This sounds complicated, but it’s not, I swear. Basically this means you can use my art if:
- You’re not making money off your use of it,
- You don’t change it,
- You credit me, and
- You link back to my site (either the specific post or the site in general) in the place you use it.
If you skip one of these steps, then you’re stealing my art, and that’s not very nice.
When can’t you use my art?
- If the post is tagged “all rights reserved” or it’s marked as a commission (often I’ve done both), it’s not available for re-use at all, period.
- If you want to put the image on or in a product such as an eBook, album cover, t-shirt or umbrella, you need to contact me about paying for a rights-restricted license. Basically, if you expect to make money off of it, then you need to pay me to use it.
- If you want to change the art, such as slapping text on it for a blog header, using it as a background for your own art, or shifting the colors to match your post theme, that’s not okay.
If you make money with your blog (either as marketing for your business or by getting advertisers), blog headers count as commercial use, anyway.
If you’re not sure, just email me! I’m totally open to helping you out here.
Okay, so when can you use my art?
If you want to use it as a blog post image, go ahead, as long as you credit and link back.
If you want to use it as a wallpaper for your computer (or print 1000 of them and wallpaper your apartment), have at. There’s even a category for posts that have free wallpapers in them. Some are cropped for iPhone, some are just huge-sized for the biggest monitor you might happen to have.
There’s probably a ton of stuff I haven’t covered here, but the basic idea is, if you want to put some tentacles on a blog post you’re probably okay. If you want to put some tentacles on your own line of handmade back-scratchers, that’s probably not okay, but email me and we’ll talk.
You can also ask questions here, if there’s something I haven’t covered. Someone else is probably wondering the same thing, after all.
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Categories: Daily Art, Words Words Words
Tags: creative commons, info, licensing, use my art
Thanks for this helpful post. I’ve had people swipe my images for commercial purposes, and it stinks! I appreciate you clarifying the legalities of this.
You’re welcome! Just keep in mind this is only the legalities for the license I’ve chosen for my images – other people might not choose to share at all, or might have more liberal sharing policies.