[Woodcarver] Re: Copyights

[Byron]

I'm sure there's millions of pictures of deer jumping over a split rail fence.  Does making the changes listed below keep you from getting sued for copyright infringement?  How close to another work would you be?  Is it possible to have a deer jumping over a fence that isn't close to another work?  How much research would need to be done to make sure you're not "too close" to another work.?  
It appears to me that avoiding copyrights is kind of like driving down the street.  You have to do best you can to avoid infringement (a crash), but sometimes it's impossilbe.  


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Ivan is very right that you just can't change the color of a hobo's pants, add one patch to his pants, make his wiener stick forked instead of one straight branch and have the spot of the hound dog on the left eye instead of the right.  All of these are extremely minor changes and what you are doing is clearly just trying to get around someone else's copyright without creating your own pattern or carving.  
 
There are however a simple set of design/composition changes that you can use as a guideline to help make sure that when your design is completed it's not a copy.  First, let me say that not everyone is blessed to be an expert with a camera and not everyone has the chance to sit in the woods for four days hoping to catch that moment when a white tail buck jumps over a fallen log ... not everyone has had the chance to spend four years in college learning the basics to composition and design.  And I think that just about everyone, once in a while, gets in a rut of doing the same thing over and over again so that you might want to try something new.  So that's where reference materials for concept come into play. Remember concepts are not copyrighted only your version of that concept is copyrightable.
 
Let's go back for a moment to that buck jumping over the split rail fence into the field with the barn complex background.  The buck is just starting the jump and his back feet are still on the ground, there is a doe and two fawns in the field. So the concept is "a buck jumping a fence line between a field and the woods".  Now let's look at the possible guidelines for large changes that can be made.
 
1. Direction - Instead of the deer going into the field what if the deer jumps out of the corn field into the woods.
2. Motion -  Instead of the deer starting the jump and so on his back legs he is now finishing the jump and so lands on his front legs.
3. Adding Elements - What if you add a raccoon ducking for cover under the fence as the deer jumps over it.
4. Subtracting Elements - What if you take out the doe and fawns from the field
5. Element Placement - If in the original design the barn was a background element what happens if you move your barn to the foreground.
6. Reversing the Composition - If the deer in the reference work is on the left side how about changing it to the deer coming in from the right side.
7. Size  - The original reference material may have been a horizontal design (11" high x 18" wide ) and you lay it out vertically (18" high x 11" wide) Which means you must add a mountain background and extra grass in the foreground to compensate for the new height.
 
Now, if you are not tracing or copying in any way ... you are drawing your own new barn and your own new deer then if you use the guideline above you will end up with a totally new, totally original creation that simply works off the concept not someone else's copyright.
 
The "Rule of Seven" which use to be taught in college is a set of compositional changes that help an artist consider a reference piece and then create their own work.  And if you check that your version has considered all seven of the possible composition changes and it does then your work will not look like a copy of the original reference material.
 
Susan Irish

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