Just wondering: Someone posted the web address of a collection of completely free photos. (see http://gal.mvc.ru) It's an awesome collection. Now, I'm not a photographer, but I do a lot of photo-art and sell my art in various venues. There are no warnings, copyrights, etc., associated with the pictures on this website. Does this mean if I create a nice piece of photo-art artwork from one of them, I can include the artwork with my preexisting collection of for-sale prints (which, by the way, are all from my own original photos)?

Any info would be most appreciated!

BK

Doug may have a better answer but I would be cautious. Looks to me like a Russian website and I'm not sure where their web ethics are in the scheme of things. Seems to me, even if I post one of my pictures on Usenet, I still retain copyright ownership. Working on them to improve your skills is probably all right. This may be similar to websites where you can upload music. Maybe ok as long as you don't get caught.

Cheers
Dave

Here is a pretty good place to look for "free" photographs. Each photo comes with copyright information, and most of them are free to use.
http://www.sxc.hu

I have seen images on http://gal.mvc.ru that I know are copyrighted (I have the original stock photo CD collections that include them) so I would be very wary of selling photo art created from images downloaded there. If in doubt I'd always err on the side of caution.

Thanks for the responses. I'll check out the new stock photo site you posted and only work with those that really are completely free.

B