Your Copyright is Protected

We've had a few questions about copyright and some understandable concerns that members could be relinquishing copyright to their work by uploading it to the site. Here are our terms of use:






SHORT VERSION WRITTEN IN PLAIN ENGLISH
As a member YOU retain full copyright to ALL artwork added to this community site. It CANNOT be reproduced, in full or in part, by us or any other member without your express permission. In fact, you own full copyright to ALL content you create on this site – blog posts, forum posts, comments etc.

You do NOT have to state your copyright or put a copyright watermark on artwork in order for you to claim copyright – it is yours by default. Watermarks and copyright statements are there only to reinforce the point and to act as a deterrent.  Of course, that also makes you responsible (not this Community site or its owners) for content that you upload. For example, if you were to upload someone else’s image without their permission, you would be infringing their copyright and we would remove the offending content.

If you add a video from the likes of YouTube (and other video sharing sites) to your page, you are NOT breaking copyright laws even though you haven’t had direct permission from the video creator. Why? Because whenever anyone uploads a video to YouTube they agree to let YouTube and its visitors distribute that video as they please.

So to recap… the only thing that How to Draw & Paint owns copyright to is the website layout and design – NOT your content. You own the rights to your content in full.

Courtesy to Other Members
If you see a piece of artwork created by another member that you would like to re-create, you must ask that  member's permission before copying the piece and uploading it to the site.   Failure to get permission, even if you credit the original artist, is a breach of copyright.  If permission is given, out of courtesy you should credit the original artist in the title of the work i.e. "Sky at Night - Based on work by Josephine Blogs".

FULL VERSION WRITTEN IN LEGAL SPEAK
Click here are our full Terms of Service (opens a new window).