[thelist] Ethical issues concerning re-use (and heavy modification) of images

[Simon Willison]

At 14:13 09/05/02 +0100, Liam Delahunty wrote:
>If I was to take a sample from a Buddy Holly record I could not use it
>without the copyright holders permission. (This is further complicated by
>the fact that music copyright expires  - I think 75 years after the death of
>the immediate next of kin of the composer.) If I were to photograph a Van
>Gough I would probably need permission from the estate to publish it.

How about if you were to scan a postcard of a Van Gough, take a small
section of it (a sunflower head for example), convert that to a vector in
Flash and then tweak it until you had your own generic sunflower image
which to the casual observer looked like a picture of a sunflower rather
than a heavily modified sunflower from a painting about Van Gough? This is
the type of use I am interested in (hence my original mail) - I am a poor
artist but a competent image manipulator and my interest lies in using
other's work as a source of raw material for the kind of alterations I
describe above.

Thanks,

Simon