Permissions to post pictures?

Hi Melody,

I’ve got a couple of your beautiful pieces (mostly dragons) and just recently got a digital camera, so of course I’ve been taking pictures of them among other things. I needed something that wouldn’t move to test the camera with long exposure settings under low light conditions and my cats just didn’t want to cooperate. 😉 I’ve managed to get a cool double-shadow effect using candles and I’m sure more experimentation will follow.

To make a long story short: I would love to post some of the pics on my Flickr account. Is that permissible? It’s non-commercial, of course, just for hobby and mostly to show off different camera settings and lighting techniques, and I would certainly give credit to you for the sculptures in the pictures.

If I’m allowed to post the pics, is there a preferred wording for the copyright notice? Also, Flickr has a couple of different licenses to put on pictures from “all rights reserved” to various creative commons licenses for picture sharing. I usually use a non-commercial attribution license on most of my pics (I don’t mind other people using them as long as they don’t claim them as their own and/or make money with them), but I assume the pictures of your pieces should be “all rights reserved” with a note that copying them requires your permission?

Anyway, if you could let me know whether I can post pictures of your sculptures publicly and/or what procedures to follow to get permission and do it properly, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks! 🙂

(P.S. I tried the contact link on the website first, but it wouldn’t let me see the required verification code to send a message…)

Thanks Melody and John!

Jennifer, I suspect the answer to your question is almost certainly yes.

From what I understand (and I’m not a US citizen and certainly no copyright lawyer, so don’t quote me on this), in the US the copyright owner of a sculpture holds the rights to ‘making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations’ of their sculpture. You can take pictures for personal use, but to legally display a picture of a copyrighted sculpture in public (e.g. on the internet) you’d have to have permission.

There are exceptions, e.g. if the sculpture is on permanent public display, not the main object and just background decoration, or if you post a picture of something you’re trying to sell on ebay, for example. (But it would be a copyright violation to sell the picture.) I would also assume that posting on this site is an exception since it is part of the Windstone site anyway.