A question about references and copyright

[mika_land]

You gotta learn the difference between iteration and copying.There a thiny line between copying and iteration.Copy is making a work that is as close as possible from the original.Iteration is when you take some piece of a work and you create something new with it.But you don't take enough of the original to make it obvious.Let say you have goku from dragon ball and you wanna make a cool fighter but you take goku head and put in on a totaly different body that still copying because there enough information to say this without a doubt someone else work.To avoid any possible copyright issue you gotta make sure your altering the work sufficiantly.For example you take the mona lisa but you set her in a totally new era you take the same pose and you change the background.Some people might be able to tell it an alternate version of the mona lisa but you have created something sufficiently different that borrow element from a sucessful piece of pop culture.But you won,t get in trouble since the copyright of this artwork is long become public domain.What is a safe thing to do is take reference that are already public domain this mean they are free to use piece of art photo and etc.

It perfectly fine to use a reference for studying the issue is more when you try to steal the credit of an other artist and step on there revenue or you try to impersonate those person.

I hope this was helpful.

 This helps a bit.  Are you saying that pop culture references are public domain?  What if it's an independent photographer of no one, erm, well known?  But otherwise what I'm getting is that if you alter it enough to make it "your own"  then it should be okay.....


I figure a example of what's in my head might help here. I have an artist that I follow that uses pinterest for his (her?) pieces.  But the alterations feel light to me. [Rashed AlAkroka] Though Rashed said that there has never been a problem.  Do you think the pieces here have sufficient alterations?

And thanks for taking the time to answer my question!