Hey y'all,

I am part of a research group who's looking to use altered versions of some fractal wallpapers as part of our visual stimulus set. The images will be cropped a good 30-50%, and turned greyscale. The images may or may not be flipped.

Since our stimulus set will comprise of around 300 images, it is extremely difficult for us to contact every artist whose images we use. So we are wondering, since we are altering the images so much, would there be copyright issues?

Thank you!

You need to get permission from the creators of the images before you use them for anything but personal use. If you send a personal message to the authors, I'm sure most of them would be thrilled to have their images used. Keep in mind that some of them may no longer be active on the site though, especially if the images are fairly old. You could also go to them members profile page and see if there is an email address there so you can contact them that way.

Please note that the difficulty of getting permission from the users is part of the difficulty of the task you're undertaking. Even if you were to use images from another site, you would need to make sure you were checking the copyrights on those images, and contacting the artists for permission there for it.

Altering the image does not remove the initial copyright as they own every bit of the image, not just the image as a whole.

There are relatively few fractalists here, so if you were to contact 7 or 8 of them for permission to use their images you would be able to collect a large portion (if not all) of what you need that way.

Thank you very much for your responses!