I’ve produced more drawings this year than I did the previous decade and then some. There are over a 100 posted so far… I thought this site was about music?
A month ago, I was giving away over 30 drawings and I had over 20 takers in just two days. Yesterday, I mailed off those drawings. I’m not certain it was necessary to give them away, but it felt right to do so because I was worried I had borrowed from copyrighted photographs without sufficient comment or alteration. It’s been on my mind all month and I’m certain that I jumped the gun on it because many of the drawings would have no problem fitting under fair-use. Still, I’m glad that those drawings have new homes across the states, and even as far as England and Australia. I’ve had tens of thousands of people visit my site from across the globe because of the drawings so I best keep at it.
Copyright infringement and fair-use
I didn’t have a strategy or any worries about style to begin with, but I now enjoy *schticking* red-letter captions on images that I come across, and I’m going to continue this, but I would like to use more of my own photos (as well as no photos). I’m grateful for all of the many comments I’ve received from visitors, friends, #draw365-ers on Twitter, etc.
The red-letter captions pair with and parody most of the images (although there is sincere saccharine), but many of these drawings, while some are more altered than others, resemble the copyrighted photo sources quite a bit and this had me worried. I didn’t consider this to be a problem early on because I simply wanted to draw, but in early May, I hit a slump in output as I wondered if my drawings fit under the protection of fair-use as parody and satire, or if they were too similar and should be taken down.
My drawings had not been for sale and I was not asked to remove them, but in the unlikely case that a photo creator found my drawings infringing, I wanted to remove them.
There is clearly parody in the conflict between the words and the pictures in many of the drawings I took down, but there are a few I’ll leave unpublished because the captions are more of a title than a comment, and the image source is too recognizable.
Soon, I’m going to post all drawings under a Creative Commons license to encourage sharing and make collaboration less cumbersome.
