Creating Textures from Possibly Copyrighted Work

With my first biggish project finished (yay!) I'm ready to move on to another concept. What I've built so far I tried to be fastidious about creating my own textures taking photos or scanning objects or using the free stuff in SL and from the web.

Now here's my problem: I can't paint well on a computer and my hand drawing/painting leaves a lot to be desired. Using the above approach worked for my last build since it was mostly all carved marble. I'm a whiz with CAD but that's not helpful when doing organic things.

One element I did include in this project, however is a flying bird. I made it by taking an image from the web and manipulating it and overpainting it until it only sort of resembles the original. I have no intention of selling this particular item (nobody'd buy it: see above regarding my skill!)

To what extent is this sort of approach kosher? I'm not working toward being a vendor of anything but I could see it happening. And that's when I think this might become an issue. The rulings on music artists sampling other artists' songs comes to mind but I don't recall the outlines of those. Also I've seen criticism of some texture makers just changing the color of an existing texture. I intend (should I go this route) to do much more than that, but it makes me think.

For the time being I'm enjoying the challenge of finding/making my own original material. But the concept I'd like to develop on my new lot is going to stretch me (a good thing) artistically and I'd like to have a better feeling for what the limits are before I devote a lot of time to making textures I ought not use.

TIA for your input!

That's a derivative work and infringes on copyright. (Not that lots and lots of people don't do that every day.)

If you want to use reference photos like that, there are lots and lots of databases available to which you could subscribe and get license to use pictures the way you want to. You can also buy them on CD. There are free images on the web too which grant you that kind of license in specific terms. Essentially, there are lots of places that provide pictures for you to use exactly the way you want to in your art.

You could also take your own photo of a bird or something else and use it too. Digital photography makes that easy now.

My general rule of thumb is that if you had to do a similar amount of work to alter the other art as a reasonably good artist would have to spend to create something from scratch, and if the result is generally different from the original, it's fair game. Something like you describe is probably just fine.

One example I did once was I wanted to make a bamboo fence. I had a hard time finding any decent photo-real sources for pictures of bamboo. But I *did* find a photo of a tri-fold bamboo screen. It was at an angle, and had some plants draped over it. But in Photoshop I was able to skew it into a front-on view, photosample parts of it to replace parts that the plants obscured, make some new parts by assembling bits and pieces form elsewhere in the photo... In the end, it was about as much work as buying the trifiold screen from an import shop, disassembling it into raw pieces of bamboo, and using those pieces to builld a fence. The resulting seamless texture didn't look very much like the original material at all, by the time I was done. I sell that texture as one of my bundles.

On the other hand, I made some outdoor murals for my own private use, in a skybox. I used a 3D rendering app to make them, but for the most part, the resulting image was a photo backdrop from a commercial add-on for my 3D app. In my opinion, the result was still too close to the original backdrop texture. So while I consider that OK to use the textures for my own personal use, I would never sell those murals.

Somewhere in between those extremes is a grey area, like adding a simple window that you bought from Artist A to a plain wall that you bought from Artist B. If all you did was export the two textures, cut a hole in one and paste in the other, and make a new tga pic with an alpha mask from that, then under the terms of use for most texture sales, it would be OK to use that texture in your own prim builds, even if they were to be sold. But I would not sell the raw texture in SL, without permission from the artists whose work you combined to make the new wall with a window in it. The small effort on your part to piece that together is nothing compared to the effort of the original artists. So claiming the altered texture as "original" wouldn't be right.

Trying to get a handle on this now. What about all those royalty-free sites? It seems like they're okay with you making something with their pictures/textures and giving it away for free, but not selling it. So if I were to build a house in SL, texture it with part of a photo I obtained with a royalty-free license, and sell it, that would be wrong? But giving it away or using it myself would be okay?

Man, I studied copyright law back in the day, and I'm still confused!

I use photos from sites where the contributors have CLEARLY indicated that it's OK to use their photos for derivative and commercial work.


sx.hu is my favorite photo site because so many of the photographers are OK with mods and resales. Just join, and follow the licensing terms.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I think I've got a better idea of what the limits are and I'm going to err on the side of caution. It'll help push me to find more creative solutions to image origination--mostly my own photos, drawings and scans of objects. In the end I'm envisioning something I'll be able to say "I did this!"

Now, fitting it in with the prim experimentation, balloon tours and spookhouse rides might be a challenge, but hey, this is Second Life. My terms, no deadlines. Ahhhhhhh.......so much to do!

Ceera, you're guessing (or wishful thinking) and you're dead wrong. The first response was totally correct. If you want to research the subject, just go to http://www.copyright.gov. Lots of great info there, and it's written for the layman.

Also, there are two aspects to consider. The first is "What am I legally entitled to do", which is, use only images you took yourself and images you know to be available for use in a derivitave product (either due to being public domain, like the Mona Lisa if you could manage to take a picture of it, or due to it being licensed for such use by the owner).

The second is "What is my liability?" if you decide to violate the regulations. In general, copyright violations are civil and not criminal matters. This changed somewhat recently due to DCMA (Digital Millenim Copyright Act), which made piracy of digital material like distributing audio and video a federal criminal offence. I am not an expert, but I doubt that your use would be likely to come under a DCMA criminal investigation.

So, more likely, your liability is that the copyright holder notices you are using their property. Their first response would normally be to notify you to cease and desist, and if you had tarnished their brand by association or if you'd made a huge pot of money based largely on their work, they would sue for damages. Neither of the latter two are likely here, so a cease and desist letter would be the most likely result.

You get to choose whether to take the high road or the low one, with its attendant risks.

This is incorrect.

The options you offered other than using the bird image from the web were great ideas and the user should seriously consider them, but the idea that a picture taken from a copyright source and (based on the OP's description), rather substantially altered, is a violation of copyright is not true. It's "fair use" if you don't intend to sell it (or make money off the promotion of it if it's free), and it's okay to use it in a final product (even for sale!), if it is "substantially altered" and forms only a portion of the finished product.

It depends on how different the final product is from the original, and it is a bit of a judgement call, but using digital sources (copyright or not) and substantially altering them to use them in your own work is not only "kosher," it's almost the only legal way to do it.

The majority of image and clip-art sites merely resell things created by others that they have bought up the "digital rights" for. In practice however, this mostly means buying a company and owning their back catalogue regardless of whether the catalogue material is already in the public domain or not.

For instance I have many, many CD's full of clip art and photo reference material I bought in the 90's. When I bought them, they were completely open license and I was able to do whatever I want with them legally. That same material has been bought up in the interim by other companies and is now offered on some pay sites at several dollars per image. The original creators of most of the artwork get zero, the company that bought the product and then re-released it in a copyrighted form rakes in the money.

Don't support this kind of extortion by purchasing pictures from these sites, you already have the right to use them (within reason), in many cases.

That also is NOT factual by law. If you buy an image and it's not royalty free or open source, and you alter it and use it, you are still violating the law. When you buy an image or other work, you are not buying the copyright, you are buying the image. That does not include altering it for personal works, esp for sale. Rule of thumb before buying any resource material is to read their restrictions. Always look for royalty free or open source on any resource you plan on using. Sometimes you will get lucky and buy a photograph from a photographer and he or she will give you permissions to make a derrivitive of that work.

If you have ever gone to any of the communities like Renderosity.com and have seen all the infringement cases they have been dealing with over the past few years, you will understand what I am talking about. This unfortunately is something the art communities on the web have been dealing with for way too long.

In all cases, keep a copy of any license you have handy for any resource you have used. That will help you in the long run if anyone wants to get uppity and say you stoled their work.

Just because it is on the web or you buy it doesn't mean it's Fair Use. Too many lawsuits are going around right now to prove that. (Couple of years ago the Royo estate settled out of court for $250,000 US for that very thing.)


As far as getting quality Royalty free images for free, http://imageafter.com/ is a great place to go.

Just make sure you download a copy of their license to your hard drive. Save your butt in the long run. LOL

Thing is guys, you are both right and both wrong. As much as people really really want copyright law to be a simple checklist of clearcut rules, it isn't that simple. It's always a judgement call, and your responsibility is to try to stay as kosher as you can since there is no 100% guarantee. In this case for example, we'd really need to see both the original image and the modified image to be able to make statements that "yes copyright is violated." Remember, at the end of the day everything is a derivative work if you dig deep enough, so the dividing line between violation/not violation is really a hazy grey cloud.

According to the letter of US copyright law about derivative works...



That said, I think a good rule of thumb to use is that the above is unenforceable nonsense if the author of the original work would not recognize anything of their photograph in your derivative work - and when considering that it's important to remember that simply photographing something does not grant the photographer a copyright on the subject of the photograph but merely on the manner in which it was photographed (the composition, lighting, and the captured moment of time). So let's say you're creating textures for a 3d model of an eagle and you use photographs off the web to extract feathers, an eye, and the claws. That may be a technical violation, but it's not enforceable. Now if the photo was the frozen moment in time of the eagle lifting off from the surface of a river with a salmon in its claws and your new work incorporated enough of that to recognize the specific photograph that captured that moment (because what are the odds that someone else captured that exact same moment), that would be a clear and enforceable violation of copyright.

Please note that these are merely my opinions and that extracting anything from a photograph for use in a derivative work is technically a violation of copyright law, but if you go by the letter of the law it soon devolves into utter nonsense. As another example, say someone photographed a page from a public domain book, and you used that photograph and ran it through some OCR software to copy the words. That would be a violation according to the letter of copyright law, which in that context is unenforceable stupidity.

I usually avoid the whole issue of Fair Use and start with images that have been put in the Public Domain or given the proper Creative Commons or Copyleft licensing. Check out http://yotophoto.com/ You can search for free images from many different websites.

The term "fair use" annoys me. People throw that out a lot as justification for their borderline activities and/or outright theft. "Fair use" is actually extremely limited to very specific research and/or parody works, and in my experience 99% of the time someone bleats "fair use" it isn't even remotely one of the specific exceptions provided for.

I also avoid the whole problem by making sure that I own or have explicit rights or permissions on the source images I use.

And there definitely is more than one standard of ethics involved when using the images produced by others, i.e. you may be able to use something based on the letter of the law.
But just because it might be legal does not make it entirely ethical.

But then there is a sense of ethics within the spirit of the art community which is more to do
with artistic integrity.

I personally think that there is a greater sense of achievement and satisfaction when you
do your best to stay on the right side of both of these issues.

Infiniview, I'm sure it wasn't your intention, but you're implying that those who use others' images in their creations are walking a thin ethical line. I strongly disagree with that interpretation. Feel free to say you want to hold yourself to a personal standard, but don't say that it may be ethically wrong to use others' images within the scope of the law. It's insulting to highly ethical people. It's also somewhat insulting to artists to denigrate their artistry if they use images of others, within the scope of the law.

For example, if I take a photo of someone standing in front of a wall, that's a copy of the wall's texture, which may be copyrighted. But it would be silly to assert that this is improper legally, ethicall, or artistically. (Note that this is an example of Jeremy's point, where copies of copyrighted work isn't necessarily an infringement. My assertion above his post was an overgeneralization.)

Good for you that you want to use only your own images. I have no problem with that. But please don't imply that those who don't share your sentiments are operating with less integrity.

BTW, your avatar here looks like it might be a photo of your SL avatar. That probably uses a skin created by someone else, meaning they have an implicit copyright. If so, would the use of your avatar photo a copyright violation? Is it unethical? Or, in the words of Flo & Eddie, "Illegal, Immoral, and Fattening"?

I didn't mean to open a can of worms here, but I do appreciate all the input.

What I have the most trouble drawing, as I mentioned above, is organic things. So now if, for example since the can is open, I want to draw a worm, I'll get together multiple images of said annelid and use them as references for shapes, colors, etc. Then I just stumble my way through making my own image.

I'm also working at trying not to worry so much about "realism" in what I make. Looking around at the things I find impressive I've noticed that some are more or less "cartoony" but that doesn't diminish their impact. In fact, the photoreal objects seem to jump out as being rather out of place.

You definitely need to read the license agreements from the site in which you are buyign the stock.

I used to use bigstockphoto.com all the time but when you go to buy the "rights" to a photo...read its special licensing agreements..you cant do much with it really. I thought "oh cool, about a buck a credit and its all mine!" Wrong. all yours to a very very minimal extent. But it really depends on what youd like to do with it I needed it for RL print work for a client, found out i was only going to be legally allowed to use it if i paid for every X amount of prints i wanted to do.

And to make it worse, they said if they(bigstock) ever discontinued the photo, id have to as well.


Kind of odd cause im not sure how they would catch you distributing it or how they expect you to keep up with what photos are still there and which are discontinued. But i guess we can all become surprised at some point.




There are alot of dif. stock photo sites, i just have yet to find a good, useful one, that doesnt tack on all these regulations and prices if you want to use it in distribution work.

Hello there,

Not at all, yes you are correct it absolutely was not my intention to convey my statements the way you took them.

And I do use other photos as well such as from the site I am a member of that gives members permission to use in their commercial work. In the first statement of my post I also
say "or have explicit rights or permissions to".

And I say this not to apply judgment to anyone else, but because it is so easy to find yourself in a mess on this issue.

My post was simply my two cents on my effort to avoid that kind of mess.
As we can see in some of the questions arising in this area the facts of a given situation are not always clear cut.

I have learned a great deal on copyrights and the legal issues surrounding them since I started in second life. Yet I am far from being an expert.

Since I do know for a fact that I am Not an expert, I was simply stating the path that I have chosen to take.

And yes you are right I do try to have my own standards in terms of originality on these issues, and I use it as a selling point for my textures.

This is in no way designed to denigrate the integrity of others. Certainly I am sure we are both aware that many people grab textures from wherever they can without any regard
for rules or permissions. I like to believe that those people are the minority.

I am sure that you are doing your best to be in compliance with the perms of others or
I doubt you would be posting here, so props to you.

Something that I agree with that Ceera said is this:



What she says here if I am reading it correctly, is that her render of a 3d product that she purchased which presumably included its own texture was too close to the original artists
work to be considered fair to sell as her own textures.
What she does not mention there is that your renders of 3d products are technically considered your artwork and thus your property.

The original intention of such products is that your going to use these products in a scene which makes up a larger work of art.
However a person can easily just focus on the texture in the render itself then go on to sell it as their own.

At this point it from a legal perspective it becomes a case of semantics and from another
artistic perspective it is a case of taking a picture of someone else's texture.

I often use 3d models that I own in order to facilitate the creation of textures. I take inspiration from the works of others but I do not just take pictures of their work.

You mentioned the skin my av is wearing on my forum av. Well even if that was from a
SL skin maker I am pretty sure they would not have a problem with the way I used it.

The picture in question is actually a base Daz figure "michael 3" which I then used
morphs to shape into a reasonable facsimile of my real self ( if somewhat optimized)
The skin is also a 3d add on product from an excellent artist who sells on Renderosity.
And again it is used in a perfectly acceptable manner. The sweater is from a pair of wool socks that I own and scanned to make that texture.


Now on the flip side as far as it being ethically wrong to use someone else's images on your products there are many dependencies involved there.

In the above 3d example I used, from the perspective of the artist who created that product, yeah they would probably object to someone extracting their texture from it to
then sell it as a texture. Even if it is technically within the letter of the law.
Or they may not object because they bought the texture from someone else. But if you asked the original creator of the texture then they would probably object.

I agree with you that people should read the license agreements on images before they use them in their work. For while it is true that you can change an image to such a degree
that it is no longer recognizable. Many license agreements explicitly forbid using any derivative of their work for commercial purposes.

Is this right or fair of them to do this, is it a ridiculous request, who knows It's not my place to judge nor do I want to be in that role. But I do believe that if it's their property
they can make any rules they want over it's use.

If someone comes to my house and I don't notice that they are taking my stuff, does that make it alright?.
Maybe it does, but if I find out they are doing it, I am not going to invite them over anymore.

I am just throwing out various comparisons here, in no way do I mean to imply that you are engaged in this kind of activity in any way whatsoever.
Your comments have just reminded me of various conversations I have had.

Certainly you are correct that their are many legitimate uses of other people's images
my point was only that people if they care should be careful to read actual license agreements pertaining to those images.

I am simply sharing some of the views of others that I have learned from and who have
influenced my opinions.

So thank you Learjeff, I was not aware that my comments implied that, I hope this clears up my intentions.

I want to make it clear that my comments here are in regards to sampling from photographs and not sampling from painting, 3d renderings, or other works were everything within it is the sole creation of the copyright holder. I view photography differently. If I'm looking for architectural details from the Empire State Building, I could go to New York City and take pictures of it myself, or I can try to find existing pictures of it. Since the photographer didn't create the Empire State Building I wouldn't feel that I was violating their copyright unless I was extracting something unique to that photo in an artistic sense. I think it's an important distinction.

If so, then I have a copyright claim. Once youve made it ambiguous by adding a jet engine, landing gear, and now have it flying over Madrid instead of Coney Island, I cant figure out if its my seagull or Chip Midnights seagull.

Ha ha,

Im no expert but I don't have your seagull...I don't think.