I'm enlightened. Also kinda keen to not let it stop me.... As an Artist /Graphic designer i'd never ever ever ever steal another fellow Artists work and pass it off as my own.....but i'm dammed if i'm not going to use certain existing imagery (race cars, old retro things) to trace around and manipulate into 'Art'.
Common sense applies here.
Personally I think there are three considerations here. There's what's legal, and then there's what's ethical. They don't have a 1:1 overlap.
So the first step is to never do anything unethical.
If what you're doing is ethical but illegal, that's when the third consideration comes into play: am I going to get caught?
If what you're doing is ethical and unlikely to get you in trouble, it's entirely your call whether or not you care that it's technically illegal.
One thing to bear in mind is that what's ethical isn't
entirely up to the individual to decide. In the grey area we all make our own decisions, but if there's a consensus amongst peers that something is unethical, individual opinion holds little weight.
Clearly I'm not encouraging the idea that you can copy whatever you want. But we all know copyright law is in desperate need of reform. We all know following it blindly is stupid. And few people actually do, despite what we might say.
Piracy is scummy, no matter what justifications people might tell themselves about overpaid record companies, etc., but there's a chasm between piracy and... shall we say "artistic borrowing"?
The problem with common sense is twofold. One is the cliché: it's not actually common. The second is that in order to exercise common sense you need to be
informed. Most people don't bother informing themselves, so you get posts like Ron's above full of misinformation.
Fair use is when I include a picture in my review. Fair use is when I photocopy a page from a book for educational use in an educational institution. Fair use is when a song happens to appear in the background of the video clip of my baby dancing. Fair use
isn't when I use a portion of an image for commercial gain - whatever that portion is.
It
might be an
ethical fair use, but it isn't a legal one.
If you come onto a public forum and ask whether or not you can use something, all we can reasonably do is err on the side of caution and say no.
If you want the answer to be "yes" then don't ask other people. If you want to
act on that yes, then educate yourself about copyright law so you know what you're doing. Know when you're doing something illegal, and ask yourself whether or not you're okay with that. Don't just assume it doesn't bother you.
For the sake of your own integrity you also need to maintain balance. If all you ever do is collage together obscure pieces of other people's images into new works, you're not much of a designer. If you use images as reference here and there, base your image on someone else's car to save walking outside to take a photo of your own, etc. then we all know there's no harm in it. But that doesn't mean we can give you the all clear - you have to do that yourself.
But again I would say, all artists and designers need to have an understanding of copyright law so they can make those decisions intelligently and independently. Don't trust what you read on forums. There are plenty of good legal resources on well-established
credible websites.
Read them.