Card drawings and copyright

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 31 May 2004, and now archived in the Forum Library.

Flavio	31 May 2004
I like to draw short stories as a hobbie and hopefully in the future to be uploaded to a website. I was wondering if it is a copyright infrignment if I draw a Tarot reading session with RWS cards and one of the characters shows a card to another? If so, I'd rather "redraw" or clone the card. Thank you very much for your comments.

hedgecub	31 May 2004
I was under the impression that the original RWS is no longer under copyright, but I could be wrong..

rota	31 May 2004
If you were to draw a picture of the Mona Lisa, that would be your own work, entirely separate in a legal sense from any other artwork, even if it were a precise, exact copy, and you wouldn't owe any money to the estate of Leonardo da Vinci. That would also be true if you were to draw RWS images into an illustration or a comic book. There's no copyright infringement there at all.

HudsonGray	31 May 2004
Since you're not trying to sell a copied deck, it's only an illustration for a story, I think you're in the clear. There's a difference between scanning in cards & hand drawing them, also. Not all the RW decks are copyright free, I think the original ones done are, but all the redrawings of the deck for updated reprintings that have been done in the past 50 years are under copyright to US Games or some such. I'm pretty sure you're ok with using them the way you described.

Flavio	31 May 2004
Thank you all for the comments, feel more confident to continue the story as originally planned. Greetings

laura_borealis	31 May 2004
Quote: Originally posted by rota If you were to draw a picture of the Mona Lisa, that would be your own work, entirely separate in a legal sense from any other artwork, even if it were a precise, exact copy, and you wouldn't owe any money to the estate of Leonardo da Vinci. That would also be true if you were to draw RWS images into an illustration or a comic book. There's no copyright infringement there at all. Is that because the Mona Lisa is past the 70-whatever-year copyright time limit? Because I thought that images owned by say, Disney, couldn't be copied in such a way. Even nursery schools have been sued by Disney for painting pictures of Mickey Mouse on their walls.

hedgecub	31 May 2004
Disney is, I believe, very militant about their copyrights. Some would argue that they're stretching copyright laws beyond reasonable limits in order to protect their empire. I'd say it's argueable whether or not anyone without Disney's power and money could pull off the same lawsuits as Disney.

Mojo	01 Jun 2004
Go straight to the horse's mouth. Here's the blurb from U.S. Games: http://www.usgamesinc.com/Info/info4.cfm According to this, if your website will be free, there will be no licensing fee. If you require memberships, you'll have to pay U.S. Games.

tao51	30 Jun 2004
but since you are drawing a replica instead of using the exact image it would probably be ok. Also, not all countries respect international copyright laws.--Tao

The Card drawings and copyright thread was originally posted on 31 May 2004 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.