funnystrange.com

Teresa Nielsen Hayden linked to my copyright page. It's in her list of links, right between "Threads Online" and "Jack Chick Halloween." Whoo! Maybe that's why the page has been getting more email than usual. I wonder how she heard of me?

I feel guilty about the people who write to me about the copyright page. People send detailed questions about their work, and I never have any idea what the answers are. Nor do I have time to find out for them. To be honest, I usually just don't reply. Hell, I barely have time to keep up with correspondence from people I know, much less complex questions from people I don't. But I still feel bad about it.

I guess they see me as some kind of expert in copyright law. Which I absolutely, positively am not. The copyright page only exists because I had to research the issue for my deck. And at the time I both had too much time on my hands, and also was royally sick of having the same endless debate about copyright law on collage mailing lists. It gets tiresome to explain, for example, how "fair use" actually works over and over to people who speak definitely but have no idea what they're talking about. I felt like engaging in these debates was only adding to the din. But failing to engage meant that people who didn't know any better might believe the flood of misinformation. So I wrote down everything I had researched on the copyright page.

I've been meaning to add a page on "theory vs. reality" for a long time. Because the information on the copyright page presents a very bleak picture of what a collage artist can do. I often get mail from artists who read my page and are just devastated because all their work turns out to be in copyright violation. But I get the impression that things are a lot looser for fine artists. My collage art was published, and publishers are super strict about the legal issues of the work they publish. I don't fault them at all; they need to protect their investments. Naturally they don't want to publish something that might get them sued. But the result is that artists who publish (book illustrations, greeting cards, etc) probably need to be much more mindful of copyright than artists who show in galleries.

I have heard of a lawsuit against Robert Rauschenberg for using copyrighted material (I think it was a Ford advertisement) in a collage. But it seems to me that if you have to be as famous as Rauschenberg to get sued, then most of us have nothing to worry about.