Pixel art Copyrights
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16447
Printed Date: 13 September 2025 at 10:26am
Topic: Pixel art Copyrights
Posted By: chinoxr
Subject: Pixel art Copyrights
Date Posted: 01 June 2013 at 7:05am
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Hello , iam newbie and iam interested about pixel art and copyright. From the nature of this kind of art is very hard to define what is copyrighted and what is not (its easy to do copypasta work of small (16 or 32) sprite looking like the original etc) ... Please help with that - anyone with experience with pixel art copyrights? |
Replies:
Posted By: StoneStephenT
Date Posted: 01 June 2013 at 9:25am
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[tl;dr version of this — Copyright protects the expression, not the idea.] If you created a 32x32 sprite and published it here on Pixeljoint, you would own the copyright to that image for however long your country of origin allows you to own a copyright. (In the United States, this means your lifetime and seventy years beyond your death.) The Berne Convention gives you an automatic copyright to anything you create in a ‘fixed state’. (In this case, you could argue that the ‘fixed state’ equals a computer file). This gives you some leeway in pursuing a legal action against anyone who you believe infringed upon your copyrights. Now, infringement…things get a bit tricky when we enter that area. With larger canvasses, creating a work that has enough differences from a similar work to count as its own unique work doesn’t pose much of an issue. In a space no bigger than 16×16 or 32×32, that gets much trickier. (You can only do so many things in such a small space.) But copyright protects the expression of an idea and not the idea itself, so if you create a 16x16 icon that looks similar to one another person created without seeing yours first (i.e. you both made essentially the same icon without knowing it), you’d both have the copyright on your specific icons. (At this point, you’d probably want to register your work with your country’s given copyright office to have a better chance at winning any form of legal action, whether offensive or defensive.) The issue of ‘originality’ also plays a role. Everyone creates works inspired by everyone else who came before them. Capcom fighting game sprites, the Mega Man franchise, NES games in general, and even a handful of pixel artists here on PJ and over on deviantArt have inspired my brief body of pixel work. They don’t get the copyright over my work, though. They would only get any form of credit if I explicitly lifted their work, in part or in whole, and used it in mine (at which point my work technically becomes a derivative work of their original work and we’ve stepped into copyright quicksand). So long as you you create something unique enough to stand alone as an original design/work and don’t copy-paste someone else’s work into your own, you pretty much own the copyright on your specific piece of pixel art no matter how small the initial canvas. (Hell, you could even make an argument that a single pixel constitutes an original work if you can find a lawyer willing to defend the claim in a court of law.) Create to your heart’s content.  [NOTE: My post here does not constitute any form of actual legal advice. I wrote my post based on years of studying copyright law as a layman. Please consult a lawyer proficient in the area of intellectual property law for actual legal advice concerning copyrights.] |
Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 01 June 2013 at 9:39am
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Originally posted by StoneStephenT [NOTE: My post here does not constitute any form of actual legal advice. I wrote my post based on years of studying copyright law as a layman. Please consult a lawyer proficient in the area of intellectual property law for actual legal advice concerning copyrights.] Hehe, the note at the bottom does quite the opposite. By stating that this is no legal advice it looks so official that everyone will accept it as legal advice ;). Great clarification! ------------- |
Posted By: StoneStephenT
Date Posted: 01 June 2013 at 10:34am
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Originally posted by Hapiel the note at the bottom does quite the opposite. By stating that this is no legal advice it looks so official that everyone will accept it as legal advice Damn! Now I’ll need to study IP law and get a degree to keep myself out of any legal predicaments. So much for any free time to pixel art… |
Posted By: chinoxr
Date Posted: 02 June 2013 at 8:49am
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Thanks for answer Stone :) u explained everything i wanted to know cheers ;) |