Thread:Walley146/@comment-104549-20181214194424/@comment-104549-20190108032210

BLUF: It's not public domain, and you'll have to figure out if it's fair use or not.

LONGER VERSION That's a well-argued point that flows logically from an incorrect premise—namely, that "[b]ecause the original image cannot be found anywhere except Pinterest, it is safe to assume the oil painting is not copyrighted." To boil down a vastly complex topic to the key points, copyright attaches to a creative work at the moment it's rendered in its final form. It has absolutely nothing to do with the image's presence or absence on the internet. For example, let's say I draw a picture on a piece of paper here at my desk. It exists only on that piece of paper, because I haven't uploaded it; despite that, I have copyright in that picture. Further, a work doesn't have to be registered with the United States Copyright Office to be copyrighted; that's only relevant in a suit for damages. As applied here, the oil painting itself (the physical object, not the picture on the internet) is the original source, and is presumably copyrighted absent evidence to the contrary.

Public domain applies in two situations: 1) when the work was never eligible for copyright in the first place, and 2) when the work's copyright expired. The former category is narrow (e.g. works created by the U.S. government). For the latter, in the U.S. copyright attaches from the moment of creation, through the life of the creator, and 95 years after that (which is why some works from 1923 just entered the public domain 1 January 2019). A New Hope was first released in 1977, and Tulak Hord was created well after that, so even if this painting was painted at the first mention of Tulak Hord, and even if the artist dropped dead the second after finishing the painting, we still have some 80+ years to go before the work enters the public domain.

Further, sharing an image online doesn't render it in the public domain or defeat its copyright; in fact, if the artist painted the picture for his own enjoyment and someone subsequently uploaded a picture of it without the artist's approval, that act of uploading would constitute copyright infringement. At a glance, and with the understanding that, although I have some knowledge of it, copyright law isn't my area of practice, I read Pinterest's copyright policy as "We aren't claiming copyright in any of this, we're just hosting it, so if it's yours and someone's infringing your copyright, tell us and we'll take it down please please don't sue us."

As a further thought, "feel free to use my art and spread my name" doesn't sound like "I release this into the public domain"; if anything, it sounds like a share-alike, Creative Commons-style release which requires accreditation to the original artist. Not rendering a formal opinion on it, just a thought.

In any event, it's never wise to presume "it's public domain unless I can prove it isn't". In fact, you're on far safer footing presuming the opposite: "it's never public domain unless I can prove it is."