The Shepherd Fairy kerfuffle that came about... was it last month?... got me to thinking about copyright, or rather, got me ranting about copyright in the arts. As I set my copyright settings on my last submission, I figured I should put a more comprehensive statement here.

Let me first state loud and clear that if an artist takes something and changes it significantly, it is now their work, entirely separate from whatever they based it on or referenced. This precedent has been long established in the world of Fine Art and is spelled out, not in quite the same language, but spelled out nonetheless, in US copyright law. People can and will bicker forever about what "significantly" means, but history seems to have erred on the side of the borrowing artist. If Richard Prince can rephotograph Marlboro ads and do nothing but crop them in slightly, blow them up and put them in a gallery, and then make millions off them without paying Marlboro or the original photographer a dime, that should tell you something about how this works. By the act of changing how we view the ad, its context, Prince radically changed the meaning of the photos and thus made them his own.

This applies to everything. If someone changes it enough, the new product is theirs. This applies to my art and yours, regardless of whether you have allowed or disallowed derivative works. I have no problem with any of this.

I usually don't bother to make any specifications at all regarding copyright when I submit. I figure if someone's going to steal it, there's not a damn thing I can do to stop them unless I happened to find out about it, and even then, they'd have to be profiting off of it for me to stop them. And in the end, if they aren't profiting, I don't care all that much. If some jerk wanted to pretend that they had made my art, it would be pretty easy for me to discredit them, that is if I even cared enough to bother. They probably aren't hurting me. If someone wants to share my work in any noncommercial way, I am happy to let them, but of course I would like to be credited. I'd love the exposure. If someone's trying to make a dime off of my work, that's where I get pissed off and that's where they violate US copyright law. And my mother-in-law is a damn good lawyer, if it came to that.

So, there's my 2 cents/my copyright policy.