Elise Andrew runs the most popular Science page on facebook. I know so, because I see her content reshared dozens of times daily in my news feed. Well, it’s not really her content, but I’ll get back to that in a minute. The point is, I F*cking Love Science is big. By posting photos, cartoons, news [...]

A few months ago, an artist who traced my photograph in the L.A. Times prompted a heated discussion: was the artist’s work sufficiently transformative to count as Fair Use under U.S. copyright law? Some copying of protected works may be allowed if the character or purpose of the copy significantly transforms the work in a [...]

Readers of this blog know how critical I can be of Creative Commons, the non-profit organization that crafts pre-made, standardized license agreements for creative works. Or rather, how critical I can be of Creative Commons users. I quite like Creative Commons itself. My trouble has been with downstream folks who struggle with the fact that CC-tagged [...]

Too many people do not understand how the licenses work. The Smithsonian ran a blog entry today illustrated with a charming firefly photographed by Terry Priest (“art farmer” on Flickr): The Smithsonian ran the photo captioned as follows: Photinus pyralis, a species of firefly found in the eastern United States (via wikimedia commons) No mention of [...]

Over at the Carbon Brief climate blog, Christian Hunt shares a series of climate reporting images so overused he never wants to see them again. For example: Hunt’s bestiary of clichéd imagery (Polar bears on ice? London underwater?) is worth a visit. But that’s not why I mention it. Rather, Hunt closes with a footnote about [...]

Leigh Beadon over at Techdirt has an unconventional response to the LA Times ant story involving an artist who sketched one of my photographs: There can be little doubt that the illustration is directly copied from the photo. But the question is, what creative contribution did Wild make himself? …Wild’s work could never have existed without [...]

Yesterday’s L.A. Times ran a charming piece about ant sex by biologist Marlene Zuk: What ant sex reminds us is that spring can be kind of scary, or at least sobering, particularly for non-humans. Millions of ants, millions of robin eggs, millions of flower seeds, most destined to die before they are even fully grown, [...]

If you blog, you probably know that most online images are copyrighted and off-limits for your site. Where is an enterprising science writer to turn for artwork that is free, beautiful, and legally bloggable? 1. Ask the artist Artists own their copyrights, but that doesn’t mean many aren’t happy to share! Often, permission for non-commercial [...]

With important sites blacked out today in protest of pending SOPA and PIPA legislation, we here at Compound Eye would like to voice our opposition with a different approach. Instead of closing down, we are opening up. I hold the copyright to many thousands of images, mostly of insects and other natural history subjects. Copyright [...]

Those of you who read my blogs may know I am a staunch supporter of intellectual property rights. A great many creative works exist because intellectual property laws allow people to spend time creating when they’d otherwise work non-creative jobs to pay the rent. The internet has, on balance, been a marketing boon for content [...]

I really don’t enjoy playing Internet Police. After this happened and this needed to be said, I don’t want to write another story about image misappropriation. About another brazen misuse of some science illustration. Le sigh. Oh wait, first rule of writing something impactful: start positive. Ok. Ahem. Once more unto the breach! In a [...]

The promised Information Economy based on creative culture is a sweatshop. Award winning illustrators, fine artists, photographers, cartoonists and animators are routinely ripped off, mashed-up, and reshared without attribution, let alone money. “But it’s always been this way!” “Good luck changing the whole internet!”  It wasn’t supposed to be this way, and creators don’t have [...]

Creative Commons Habits Are Hard to Break Creative Commons Licences are Good Things, in my estimation. I’ve had one on my personal art blog The Flying Trilobite since almost the very beginning. There are different grades of Creative Commons Licences (CCL), and like many artists, I’ve stuck with the most restrictive one. Without giving you [...]

Freelancing is tough. Most of us learn on the job and get a lot of bumps and scrapes along the way. There are success stories, though, and if you can master the basics of Small Business 101 the benefits of being your own boss and managing your own schedule are rewarding. When I look around [...]

So I’m putting together this post on great evolution cartoons that focus on the water-to-land transition and I remember this Gary Larson cartoon from the Far Side that depicts three fish in the water staring longingly at their baseball lying on the shore, a few feet from the water’s edge. The caption reads, “Great moments [...]

Should an illustration of a dinosaur skeleton be considered as functional as a pair of jeans? Watching this TED Talk with Johanna Blakley recently discussing copyright and fashion, she points out that some creative industries have little or not copyright. The world of fashion. Automobile design. The tattoo design industry.  The reason, Blakley points out, [...]

In  the wake of the recent discussions about copyright sparked by Pinterest’s Terms of Service, I thought it would be informative to answer the question, “How do artists protect their work online?” Here are the answers from a spectrum of science-artists. – – – “Most of what I sell online is original watercolor paintings and [...]

[First, you may want to read  The Promise & Perils of Pinterest by Glendon and Pinterest Terms of Service: Word by Terrifying Word by Kalliopi. There's also a Link Round-Up on The Flying Trilobite.] “But all sites are the same” Since Kalliopi and I wrote about our views of Pinterest’s Terms of Service, I’ve noticed a common misconception [...]

Pinterest is surely a rising star. For those of you not in the know, it’s the online equivalent of a bulletin board – a slicker, cleaner way to put together collages of your favorite styles, photographs, design ideas, or dino art. But lately, Pinterest’s terms of service have been garnering a lot of criticism for [...]

The Promise – a bold credited, copyright future Initially, I was enamored by Pinterest, the image sharing and collecting site.  It’s like a visual scrapbook of all the things you love online, and does what Tumblr has neglected to do, and requires a link back to the source of each image. Amazing. A boon for artists, illustrators [...]