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Popular Clip Art

Are There Problems With Private Use?

This website is so informative. I stumbled across it tonight and am getting so many wonderful ideas! Just in time for holiday gift giving!

I was reading your information for putting decals on soap and had a fun idea.

My son’s dresser knobs are solid wood. I'm thinking of painting them white, and using my inkjet printer, printing a graphic using the Lazertran Waterslide Inkjet Decals you recommended.

He's really into dirt bikes right now.

You mentioned Print Master graphics software.

Do you know if they have popular images like Transformers, Dr. Seuss, and other well known characters? If these come out good for him I was thinking of making some to sell but don't want any lawsuits bcuz of copyright infringements.

I've seen several people on eBay selling these knobs with transformer decals, or Elmo, etc. I'm thinking A) where are they getting these images from and B) this can't be legal!

Thank you!

Jeannie

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Unless the eBay sellers have purchased a license to use the character clip art from the copyright owner for profit, they are almost certainly infringing.

I’m not a lawyer, but I believe it is permissible to use images you have acquired from a software program, book or magazine to make derivative art for your personal use or as a gift.

Some copyright owners do sell commercial licenses to their work, but I doubt this would be the case for the popular character images you mention.

So you’re probably correct that "this can’t be legal" when you talk about the eBay sellers advertising items they have embellished with popular characters.

Where are they getting the images? They’re probably copying them from the Internet or scanning hard copy images which they’ve found in books or other publications.

Internet sites try very hard to make images they want to protect difficult to copy.

Some sites add faint watermarks noting the copyright on images. Most make the image files so small that they would be very pixelated when printed. This makes them useless to image poachers for anything except the tiniest applications.

Even Google tries to help protect copyright owners by posting a warning about possible copyrights when you do a Google Image Search.

All that said, you will find sites which say you can download their large beautiful clear images of popular character art royalty-free.

I would steer clear of those unless I could find a notice of terms of use. If there is no mention of copyright on the site, they can’t be legit.

Some of the popular card making software programs used to include character sets or offer them for an additional fee.

However I don’t see many doing that anymore. My guess is that putting the graphics into the hands of home crafters became problematic.

Many home crafters have little to no formal art training (where artistic copyright is a required subject) and are just trying to make a little money on the side.

I’ve written a lot about artistic copyright. You may find this article about using clipart found in software art galleries helpful.

Thank you for your kind words about The Artful Crafter. I’m delighted you like my site :-D

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