2 copyright related questions

  • Unknown's avatar
    anthroposingeniosa · Member ·

    The first question is about the copyright notice – I’ve included the standard wordpress one suggested in your help pages in the footer… but it’s occurred to me that some of the images I intend to use in my blog are modified wikimedia commons images, and they’re on a share/share alike license so if you make derivative images from them you have to release them on a similar license. So I need to make this clear, but what is the right etiquette for this? should I change the wording of the copyright notice, or should the images have their own individual share/share alike license? how does that work? (sorry I’m quite new to some of this) Most of the pics on there are not mine and I’m crediting them according to the licensing requirements, although I’m intending to include my own images as well, which would fall under the copyright notice.

    The second question is regarding the exact definition of a derivative image. I have looked on a lot of different websites that explain about copyright law and none of them make this clear.

    For example the cartoon in this post: http://cavepeopleandstuff.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/squat-like-a-cro-magnon/ is a sketch based (somewhat, not entirely) on a photo
    of an exhibit at a museum in Germany (i.e. a reconstruction of a neanderthal man dressed in modern clothes). So would that be a derivative image? And isn’t the actual photo a derivative work already (the photo I used is copyrighted, I checked)? And how would anyone knew whether I got the sketch from the photo or the museum exhibit?

    I really need to know this because I want to include my own artwork/sketches on my blog, which is themed around palaeolithic people, and it’s not like drawing modern people where you can ask any random person to model for you, so I use various digital and physical reconstructions of earlier human species to make the sketches… most of the images I use are copyrighted. There are a few creative commons and public domain ones, but the best/most scientifically accurate ones are copyrighted and are forensic reconstructions. I presume a sketch that’s obviously a sketch of a particular copyrighted image is a derivative work, but what about if I’ve used a few different images to get the details right from a scientific point of view, but the image I end up doesn’t look the same as any of them….?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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