Copyright infringment as it concerns lace

Lace is one set of textures that present quite the challenge for myself. I have looked at lace on SL and have to admitt that I am fairly certain that most or all of the good lace textures that I have seen have been photosourced. What is one to do then? Isn't lace like a print which is copyrightable? Where does the copyright begin and end on such.? I think that lace is one fabric that wouldn't be easy to fake or do in adobe photoshop. The lace tutorials that I have seen don't offer much and neither do the lace brushes for these.
What about if one bought the lace from a fabric store and scanned it in? Don't they then own the lace? What about all the changes in size and perhaps even color? That was a point offered by someone in SL but I have no more certainity on this subject. Could someone please shed some light on all of this?

Thanks, Wright

I may get in big trouble here but, I will go out on a limb and say, “I think very few people worry about copyrights with lace in SL.” Yes, most lace you see in SL is photo-sourced. Other than the professional artists among us, I doubt that many of us draw lace?

Using myself as an example. I have photo-sourced lace and used it. I have also “attempted” to draw lace. I love lace. It is so feminine and rich looking. So here are my techniques for lace.

As you stated, rarely can you just pull a strip of lace out and drop it in a template. The size, direction, angle and curves of the photo-sourced lace rarely meet your needs. Besides drawing it by hand. I have used three different techniques.

I will copy a section of the pattern lace and paste it over-and-over to make a larger section of lace. I will use this for a lacy neck line. I can use CRTL-T to rotate and shape the different pasted layers to fit the curve of the neck line. I then merge all the layers into one.

Because most lace is just a series of repeating patterns, I will drop the lace picture in Photoshop and trace it. I only draw the small section I want to repeat. I then make into a Fill Pattern and by using the Path tool I will select the area I want the lace in and fill it with my lace pattern. I then outline the path/selection to get my borders.

Another technique I have started doing builds on the one above. I blow up my pattern so I can easily see both sides of the lace pattern. I trace both sides, which will be the shadows/edges using a Multiply layer . Then on a new layer, I will go over the pattern with a thick color brush. This fills in the middle with color.

I now have two layers for my lace. One is the edges/shadows that gives it the depth and texture. The other is a flat color version of the lace. When I want to us it, I can do the same as above, making a fill pattern. However, because I have two layers I can change the color layer to whatever color I need, i.e., gold, silver, black, etc. The multiply layer will automatically match the layer color.

Robin Sojourner has a tutorial on making lace. I think it is on her website, www.robinwood.com She also did a mini tutorial on using smart vectors with lace. I can’t give you any more details on what it was about but, if you have every seen any of her tutorials, you know it is very good.

I hope this helps you?

Jen

That's a really interesting question, Wright. I never really thought about it before, but the answer is yes, lace patterns are copyrighted material. Technically, without the permission of the copyright holder, you can't reproduce the pattern.

I'd imagine that within the textile industry this is probably a big deal. There are probably fabric companies who protect their various patterns from each other with fury and vigor. I'm not sure why, but somehow that seems funny to me, makings for a great SNL sketch perhaps. Maybe not.

Anyway, for what it's worth, my personal feeling is I'd probably agree with Jen on this one. While technically you shouldn't reproduce ANY copyrighted material you do not own, I don't think the lace people really care about photographs of their stuff, or about people making digital textures from them. That's a pretty flimsy and assumptive defense, no question, but it's the only one there is.

Of course, if you want a completely clear conscience, you can certainly make lace from scratch in Photoshop. I'd probably recommend doing it with brushes, but there are lots of different techniques that will work.

If you don't want to do it entirely by hand yourself, here are some links I just found that might be helpful:

108 lace brushes for $20 from Graphics by Sage

28 free lace brushes from Obsidian Dawn

23 lace brushes from RDNA, free if you join the site

There are thousands more if you care to google for them, or as I said you can make your own.



Oh, and Jen, you might want to fix a typo in your link to robin's site. Drop the S off the end. It's robinwood.com.

The other thing you can do is photosource antique lace. Anything made more than about 80 years ago is out of copyright.

Personally, I use a mixture of antique lace and Sage's brushes, (which are wonderful and well worth the price.)

There are many sources for antique lace. However, you should be aware that although the lace itself is out of copyright, the images of the lace you'll find on the websites for various sellers are not.

So I suggest that if you want to be scrupulous about copyright, you buy the stuff, (it's often sold in tiny lengths for collection and study, and is much more reasonably priced that way,) and scan it yourself. (In my experience, you'll get better results that way anyway. You can make sure it's straight on your scanner, and that the scan is sharp and clean. And you won't have any .jpg artifacts to deal with.)

You can also use those scans to make lace brushes of your own!

Hope this helps!

Of course, you could always contact the owner of the lace and ask for permission. Once they realize your request, they will most likey say yes for two reasons.

A: they are laughing so hard that you are asking permission to use the image of the lace in a online game and they fail to understand gaming and so think the entire thing is so stupid and beneath them. So they see no harm in it at all.

B: the have been reading Wall street Journal and Businessweek and realize that you are giving them an opening that they never though they could have. It will look good for the company and the ddue who approves it come bonus time.

They could of course ignore you or say no because of a: But Second life has been in enough mainstream news that i think they might know.

Happy Thnaksgiving everyone!

Yikes! Sorry it took so long to reply. I was traveling for Thanksgiving, yesterday. Thanks for the heads up, Chosen. I will fix it..

My apologies to Robin.

Happy Thanksgiving to all,

Jen

Thanks to everyone who has replied to my post. All the information is helpful.

Thanks Wright

This is very helpful. There is alot of antique lace stuff out there. However, and I post this so that perhaps we might benefit from it, I did some investigation on copyright laws and am now under the impression that these images of the antique lace have no valid copyright. This is all new to me so I am open to critique here.

Here is what I found:
That for a work to be copyrightable that the work must have original content. One person quotes on Wikipedia (which is perhaps reason for caution):

"Wikipediaublic domain image resources: Accurate photographs of paintings lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once the painting's copyright has expired (95 years after initial publication). All other copyright notices can safely be ignored." - Montrealais

So, I did a little research and my understand is that a derivative work from these designs whose copyright has expired have no copyright protection unless they have original content.

I don't know if I am correct aoubt all of this but if I am it sure might save us all some time.

Thanks,

Wright Maryfield