ALICE NEFF LUCAN

 

Here’s the disclaimer. This has been offered for your information to help you decide whether you need advice from a copyright lawyer. So read and heed. But if a non-lawyer tries to apply this as legal advice, there is a huge risk that the information will not be applied correctly. One fact omitted or added can change the legal outcome.

 

It is NOT okay to change art or text, then use a copy.

 

Copyright protection gives the author all of these exclusive rights:

to copy the work,

display or perform the work,

prepare derivative works,

and to distribute copies of the work.

and more.

 

17 U.S.C. @ 106

 

The right to make copies after a change is the right to make derivative works. Many people think it is okay to make easy changes to someone else’s work and escape copyright infringement. Not so. The following list shows examples of derivative works. If a third person does these things without permission, risks an infringement on the original copyright.

 

Copying from Google Images and pasting into your own work

Changing the colors in graphic art.

Stylizing a photograph

Translating the text into a different language

Cropping a picture

Changing the work from photograph to sculpture

Writing a dictionary based on another’s novels.

 

Are you excused if you’ve made your altered copy for a news use?  Don’t count on it.  If the copied image is the news story, then perhaps the copy is a "fair use."  If the copied image was used in place of a fair bargain for the image, the copy risks infringement.  

 

However, if the copier takes the original and changes it somehow into something new and different, the copier may have made a transformative work. Be really careful with this because if you’re simply cropping the photograph to make it a better picture, your copy is still a derivative work.

 

On the other hand, if you copy a frame from a news videotape and use it differently from its original purpose, in a television intro slide for example, there may be no infringement. When you’re engaged in this kind of copying, you really do need a lawyer’s advice. The cases on this issue of “fair use” and “transformative” issues are very close calls, some might even say contradictory. Small changes don’t work. Big conceptual changes may escape copyright infringement but that means the copy may not imitate or replace the purpose of the original work.