Thanks Karen. Your site rocks.

For a comic book project I’m using a lot of photo material as documentation.

I found one photo so impressive that I used it quite literaly and asked the photographer if I could use it that way. I included the finished drawing in my request, specified that I would explicitely thank him in the book and give him a copy of the book and invite him at the presentation – to which he enthousiastically agreed.

But I’m still worried about the photographs I used partially. The internet is a vast library of information, be it textual or visual. I contacted a (government funded and free!…but in Belgium:) ) legal advisor for artists and she said that “it depends” whether it’s plagiarism or not and that “every case is interpreted differently by courts” and that “intuition should give you a good clue as to how far you can go”.

Intuition??? And she is a specialist!

Sure, I’ll “cover my tracks” by using a different perspective or more windows in the background or (very typically) replace the people, the colors, the number of windows…
(Doesn’t that last line sound criminal?)

But what if I like that schadow line or that dog looking out of that window?
There used to be a youtube clip where many sources of Moebius (Jean Giraud) where displayed next to the drawing and all of them where clearly single-source interpretations – often of old black-and-white stills from western movies. Did he ask permission for all of these? Currently that clip has been removed from youtube.

I think that this topic, where google ‘opens the doors’ is eventually the way it will progress for the whole internet, but as I read on some other blog “if musicians cannot use the tiniest sample without permision, even if you distort it with loads of effects, so why would it be different for visual ’samples’ that you distort by turning it into a painting?