Written by ~against-copyrights. This text may freely be copied, edited and printed without explicit permission, as long as the message contained within remains unharmed.
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Not every image found online is copyrighted :
Typically, works must meet minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for a copyright, and the copyright expires after a set period of time. Different countries impose different tests, although generally the test is low; in the United Kingdom there has to be some 'skill, originality and work' which has gone into it. However, even fairly trivial amounts of these qualities are sufficient for determining whether a particular act of copying constitutes an infringement of the author's original expression.

In the United States, copyrights are automatic as soon as the expression is secured in a fixed medium (for example, a drawing, sheet music, a videotape or a letter). There is no requirement that a copyright be officially registered for the author to obtain rights. (source: wikipedia.org)

Therefor images that only exist in digital format are not necessarily copyrighted nor are images created outside the US. Also, copyrights on most artworks expire after a period of approximately 60 years.


Anyway, even regardless of this : it's not always easy to track the owner of a picture online, let alone get them to respond and grant you permission. Getting this permission on paper, is even harder.

Copyrights as enforced today severely limit artistic freedom, especially for artists who are skilled at photomanipulation, music sampling, film making and other kind of artwork that require some recources an author can't obtain freely. Especially artists who create art as a hobby, thereby become unable to follow their muse, because they crash onto copyright walls constantly, unless they infringe it or go into debt.

Due to copyrights, one of the world's expressionist masterpieces even almost got lost. "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens" by FW Murnau, filmed in 1922, is one of the most important movies in the history of horror. Its use of claire obscure and several other techniques that were typical for the German expressionist scene were used in such a wonderful fashion, that this movie influenced many other horror movies later to be made. It was however made in a time when copyrights weren't really cared for in Germany, and the makers of this film came to regret that. It was based on the Bram Stoker's book "Dracula", without asking permission of the copyrights holders in the US. Following this, an American court ordered all copies of this movie to be destroyed, rather than just a percentage of its income to be redirected to the copyright holders. Had not a single copy been remained somewhere under the dust, this movie would have been lost forever.

More recently, there's of course the great controversy over Danger Mouse's "Grey Album" (a mix of the Beatles and Jaz-Z), early 2004, leading to what would be called "grey tuesday". On Tuesday 24 February, hundreds of websites around the world offered the album to download for free, and thousands, including this website, turned grey for the daywebservers, as an act of civil disobedience, to punish EMI for their efforts to crush this album, simply because there was no permission asked to use the Beatles' samples.

And then of courses there's the whole controversy over file sharing and the development of the free software movement, due to the many restrictions of proprietary software.


"Copyright was developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright - to promote progress, for the benefit of the public - then we must make changes in the other direction." - Richard Stallman

Check out Creative Commons and the GNU project.

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