There comes a time in any creative career where an artist must ask, “Can I make this idea of mine real, without getting sued into oblivion?”
Reproducing art is a fraught issue, especially in the age of AI-generated images. Aside from the legal objections, there are moral objections to be made when the creator of the image is relying on royalties or recognition. I’ve been on both sides of this, too: the comics that my artists and I have created are sometimes repurposed online, and not always in ways I’d approve of. Only a few of the image clues (seen below) are fully my creations, and the haphazard look of the last of them should make it clear why drawing the rest of them wasn’t an option for me.
That said, I was prepared to let fair use be my umbrella to some degree. There’s a lot of precedent of using stills or clips from media properties when you’re just invoking those properties, as in a film review or an academic discussion. A crossword clue is not any kind of competition for a movie or TV show, so even the famously litigious Disney should have no issue with the images shown here:
Likewise, corporate logos. Basically, if you can imagine a dozen different news articles clipping it, then there shouldn’t be any problem with a puzzle clipping it, too.
In a few cases, there were publicly available resources that allowed me to mimic corporate logos, which I used as a new type of typographic clue:
Celebrity photos are a bit more challenging, but sometimes, the clipping policy was good enough: if there was a famous TV show, movie, or music video that showed them, I could just rely on that.
There were also classic artworks, art from “for sale” pages that would get taken down within weeks, and uncopyrightable images like simple flag designs. But sooner or later, I’d run into a case where I needed a photo that belonged to somebody. Thankfully, there are royalty-free websites like Dreamstime and iStockPhoto that offer these for cheap, especially if you buy in bulk.
Oddly, I ended up using these resources more for simplified illustrations—pictures that were essentially emoji, even if they didn’t work as such on my system. A couple of these were taken from Facebook and Discord’s more specific emoji environments…
But most were more like emoji designs in search of a system like that. For those, I had to go back to royalty-free marketplaces.
For all my preparations, though, there’s a certain “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission” philosophy in play here. Too much boldness borrows trouble; too much caution gets you nowhere. How certain am I that my bases are covered? Only as certain as I can be. Some days, that has to be enough.
Tomorrow: Words as pictures, pictures as words.