It’s by no means impossible to use an image that is copyright-protected – you just need to get a license or other permission to use it from the creator first. In most cases, using the work either involves licensing an image through a third-party website, or contacting the creator directly. It’s also possible to transfer copyright between people.

As a general rule, if you use a copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s permission, you will be liable for copyright infringement. “Fair use” is a limited exception to this rule for certain kinds of use. The most well known examples of fair use are parody and news reporting, but many other types of use could qualify.

Without getting too bogged down in legal analysis, the bottom line is that the new work must be transformative, any copyrighted work used should be proportional to the whole and not be too substantial in terms of the overall work, and the artist must have a genuine creative reason for using the image or other work, rather than using the material to get attention or avoid coming up with something fresh.

It addresses common situations where a curator, academic, writer, teacher or artist might want to reproduce an image of an artwork and outlines circumstances when the US doctrine of ‘fair use’ can be invoked, enabling the reproduction of a copyright-protected work without clearance from the copyright-owner.