Is There An Internet Artists License?

diapir wonders: "Does anyone know about existing licenses available for artists interested in publishing art on the internet? I want to allow free distribution of the art as long it isn't used for profit."

Berne international copyright law

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

Thanks to the Berne convention (sp?) all creative works by a person are implcitly copyright to them. As such, any artist whose work is used under a license that they do not agree with can sue, though it's rather difficult for the artist to prove that the work is theirs (especially when going up against a big corporation or whatever). Basically, art isn't put under a "license;" the artist can dictate whatever terms the art is available under. For example, put up a notice saying "this artwork can be distributed freely as long as it is not modified or used for profit" and you're covered.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

The GPL!

[Ben Smith]

The GPL covers "any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The 'Program', below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work
based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language." So yes, you can GPL your art.

One interesting project underway involving GPL'd art is the Free Music Philosophy [ram.org].

OpenContent License (OPL)

[sdt]

Hi, my name is Stefanus Du Toit, I'm a server developer at the WorldForge Project [worldforge.org]. For our code we use the GPL, but we found that it wasn't very applicable to Art (Music, Graphics, etc.) and "usual" text (e.g. rulesets). So, we licensed all of the non-code stuff under the OpenContent License (OPL) [opencontent.org]. It is similar to the GPL (free speech type license) but concentrates on artwork and regular text. Go take a look at it, it might be just what you are looking for ;).

-- sdt

Inet lisensing

[Fooknut]

seems like there are no true ways to keep people from stealing what you do.
'I sugegst using photoshop to add a watermark to each of your pieces of Art. Yes, this won't track anything, but at least you have proof of copyright just in case you see your stuff used anywhere.
It's almost impossible to keep people from using your stuff....

Is