by CrendoGal » May 17th, 2006, 9:36 am
Interesting thread....
Pages are shown in all the scrapbooking mags using papers that are copyrighted by their designers...and although most are credited (i.e. "patterned paper by Three Gypsies" etc.) sometimes the person submitting the scrapbook page doesn't remember who made the paper (i.e. "patterned paper by unknown source"). You can't copy the paper and use it in a digital download, sell a variant of the design to another paper copy, etc., but you can create scrapbook pages using the paper & get paid for the design of the page, as well as selling items made from the paper. Any scrapbook paper company that said that there would be no submitting to magazines, and no selling things made with their paper would find that their paper didn't sell anymore -- scrapbookers are FAST at spreading news like that, and no scrapbook/craft store would want to sell something that could get their clients in trouble (because nearly all scrapbookers dream of one of the layouts being published one day and many of them make $$s for their addiction by making things and selling them).
Rubber stamps are an unusual area -- you have regular rubber stamp companies and then "angel" companies. Non-Angel companies say (in their catalogs, for example) that you can't sell anything that uses their stamp in it, so no stamping that image in a collage and then selling the collage. Angel companies, however, allow you to use a stamped image in cards or collages or whatever as long as you follow their limits, which are usually something like must be hand-stamped and no more than X copies for sale at one time, that sort of thing. But I've seen several How-To books recently that instruct the reader to stamp an image and then enlarge it on a photocopier, and to me that's problematic. Will the copyright office uphold the designer's rights to the image if they allow photocopying? But how do you stop people from putting that type of instruction in a how-to book without spending $$$$s more than the cost of a entire product line on lawyers to sue the book editor/publisher? What a headache for the small RS designer....