[Clipart] Librarians be aware of http://www.freeclipartnow.com

[Greg Bulmash]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Francis Bond <bond at ieee.org> wrote:
>> Question:
>> This email has me worried that even PD and CC images may not be truly free
>> for any use. Are they?
>
> Yes they are.
>
> What we are worrying about here, is that someone may upload a file that they
> do not have the right to release as public domain, but still claim it is
> public domain.   However, if you download the file in good faith, then I
> think you shouldn't need to worry.

If you download the file in good faith, but the image is not really
PD/CC, the owner can still come after you and cost you a lot of money
in lawyers to defend yourself.

Since you're in Singapore, though, they couldn't sue you in absentia
in the U.S. and then go to Singapore and get the judgement enforced.
Judges in one jurisdiction usually don't like judges in another
jurisdiction telling them what to do, so anyone wishing to sue you
would either have to follow a bunch of arcane rules to sue
internationally, or would have to find a lawyer in Singapore to sue on
their behalf there.

Once the suit was filed... in the U.S., you could claim innocent
infringement, which carries a penalty of just a couple hundred
dollars, not the potentially massive statutory damages of
$30,000-$150,000 per infringement that they'd threaten you with. But
in the U.S., the cost of defending the suit and getting to a ruling
that it was innocent infringement could cost you $20,000 or more, so
they use that to get you to pay them $4,000 or $5,000 to go away.

Sadly, if someone submits art that isn't PD, you use it, you get
caught using it, and the owner is a jerk, you're still in for some
pain, because they don't have to prove anything until the case comes
to trial, but they can cost you a lot of money just getting to the
beginning of the trial. So they can use the threat of a trial to make
you pay more than they'd win at trial, just because it's cheaper for
you to pay them off than fight them.

But, honestly, in a society where anyone can sue for anything and you
usually have no recourse against them for filing a frivolous lawsuit,
you're never safe from being sued. You could draw all the art yourself
and be sued by someone who claims your art looks too much like theirs
and thus must be an infringing derivative work.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm being sued over using art I thought was safe
and I've had to have a couple of OCAL submitters and one artist who
created drawings for me on contract sign declarations to help me prove
that the guy suing me is... mistaken.