Thread:Seireitou/@comment-4119307-20130106040020/@comment-186.44.174.7-20130108103739

Look I am not causing trouble. I have been polite and professional (no ill language, cursing, insults etc) I am merely trying to voice my greivances with my pictures being used. I would expect more from the owner/head of the site to be more open minded. But anywayz since you are so hellbent on sticking with the bs that you know Wiki Law, US law and such let me educate you.

http://about.deviantart.com/policy/copyright/ This is devianart's policy on copyright. Basically it states that any art done by a user unless bought or given permission to use, is copyrighted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States This gives a nice summarized version of US Law regarding copyrights, so it'll be easier to sift through.

Idea/expression dichotomy
Copyright law protects the expression of an idea, but copyright does not protect the idea itself. This limitation is called the idea/expression dichotomy. What this says is that anything made is copyrighted. But the idead (the mechanism, the workings etc is not) Which in regards to a site like this means that you can't juse an original image, but you can create another image in its likeness or similar.

First owner of copyright
The author of a work is the initial owner of the copyright in it, and may exploit the work himself or transfer some or all the rights conferred by the copyright to others.[25] The author generally is the person who conceives of the copyrightable expression and fixes it or causes it to be fixed in a tangible form. Exceptions and special cases in determining the author are:
 * Works for hire. If a work is made "for hire" within the meaning of the Copyright Act, the employer or commissioning party, who paid for the work and took the economic risk of it, is deemed the author for copyright purposes and is the initial owner of the copyright.[26] Any other work done by that writer on his own without compensation and without using company resources usually is owned by the writer (though employers often try to claim ownership of such work). The circumstances under which a work may be found to be a work for hire are:
 * Work prepared by an employee within the scope of his employment. In Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989), the Supreme Court held that the term "employee" in this context should be interpreted according to common law agency principles. If the person doing the work is an "employee" within the meaning of the common law, and the work was done within the scope of his employment (whether the work is the kind he was employed to prepare; whether the preparation takes place primarily within the employer's time and place specifications; and whether the work was activated, at least in part, by a purpose to serve the employer), then the work is a work for hire and the employer is the initial owner of the copyright, rather than the employee who actually conceived and fixed the expression.[26]
 * Specially ordered or commissioned works. Works created by independent contractors (rather than employees) can be deemed works for hire only if two conditions are satisfied. First, the work must fit into one of these categories: a contribution to a collective work, part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, a translation, a supplementary work, a compilation, an instructional text, a test, answer material for a test, or an atlas. Second, the parties must expressly agree in a written, signed instrument that the work will be considered a work made for hire.[26]

All that means is that whoever creates the work owns it and is free to use it as he/she sees fit. Same applies to a joint copyright (for instance a commission on deviantart). Also only if the owner sells or grants permission then it is legal to use, otherwise it is an infringement of the law.
 * Ownership of copyright in a joint work. The authors of a joint work are co-owners of a single copyright in the work. A joint work is "a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or independent parts of a unitary whole."[26] [27]
 * Ownership of copyright in a collective work: A collective work is a collection of independent, separately copyrightable works of authorship, such as a newspaper, magazine, or encyclopedia.[26] In the absence of an express assignment of copyright, the author of each individual work in the collection retains copyright in that work.[25] The compiler, or author of the collection, owns copyright in the expression he or she contributed, which is primarily the selection and arrangement of the separate contributions, but may include such things as a preface, advertisements, etc., that the collective author created.[26]

And again I quote the bottom from wiki law as previous which reiterates the same thing.

So in all sure people are free to use images from deviantart and alter them as they see fit, ONLY if bought or granted permission from its owners. My images were neither, therefore were in breach of all theses laws.

The difference in me is that instead of saying i know this and that, I have backed it up with concrete evidence, not my own making, but rules that were established before.

I hope this clears things up. Peace.

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