A collection of free images for crafters selected by crafters.

About Us

Reusable Art is an ever-growing resource for crafters and website designers. The idea behind Reusable Art is to breathe new life into old drawings, photos, and other illustrations that appeared in books, magazines and other periodicals and have since gone out of copyright.

Copyright Laws

Copyright law varies from country to country. There have been extensive efforts by the World Trade Organization, the European Union and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works to come up with a consistent standard to be used world-wide. The Berne Convention gives the original creator of literary and artistic works copyrights to their work for their natural lifetime plus 50 years. The problem with Berne is that it allows for individual countries to enact stronger laws regarding copyright duration.

On the Wikipedia website, they have compiled a list of the Duration of Copyrights by Country.

For the most part, most countries either stick with the death plus 50 years restrictions or use date of death plus 70 years.

There are a few that extend copyright protection beyond 70 years after the death of the artist.

• Columbia- 80 years
• Cote d'Ivoire - 99 years
  
• France - uses 70 years after death plus 14 years and 272 days for the two World Wars and adds an additional 30 years if the author dies on active service (which means in France copyright can extend up to 114 years and 272 days beyond the date of death of the creator)
  
• Guatemala - 75 years
  
• Honduras - 75 years or 70 if the item was published more than 50 years ago (All images on Reusable Art were published more than 50 years ago.)
  
• Mexico - 100 years
  
• St. Vincent and the Grenadines - 75 years
  
• Spain - 70-80 depending on year of death (for most works on Reusable Art, 80 years would be used)
  

The researchers at Wikipedia were unable to determine the durations of copyrights for the countries that follow. Residents and anyone wishing to create and sell public works in these countries are encouraged to use the information provided to determine the copyright status of images on Reusable Art prior to using any of our images for public works.

• American Samoa
  
• Anguilla
  
• Aruba
  
• Bermuda
  
• British Indian Ocean Territory
  
• British Virgin Islands
  
• The Cayman Islands
  
• Eritrea
  
• Laos
  
• Nauru
  
• San Marino
  
• Sao Tome and Principe
  
• Somalia
  
• Turkmenistan
  
• Vanuatu
  

Any country not specifically mentioned extends copyrights no more than 70 years beyond the lifetime of the artist. All images appearing on Reusable Art fall into this last category, making them copyright free in most of the world.

In the United States, anything published prior to 1923 is no longer copyrighted.

Additionally, US law uses a term of 95 or 120 years after publication to determine copyright duration when the original author is unknown or their date of death can not be determined. For those works attributed to a person, 95 years is used. For those works where no author is listed and/or where the copyrights were owned by a corporation (typically the publisher), the copyrights expire 120 years after publication. To be on the safe side, if we can not determine a date of death or the name of the original author/illustrator, we will consider the image free of copyright if at least 120 years have passed since the work was published.

When a creative work falls out of copyright it is said to be "copyright free" and in the "public domain". That means that the original artists do not have to be paid royalties or any other fees for the use of their work.

According to a copyright specialist at the US Copyright Office, the spirit of a copyright is to allow the original holder of the copyright to enjoy full rights to their work for a limited period of time. After that time, it is hoped that others will build upon the original work and improve upon it.

It is with that spirit of improving on the original work that ReusableArt.com was born.

Public Works Using Images Found on Reusable Art

If you plan on using any of these images in commercial work (stuff you make to sell) you can do so freely as long as you only sell the finished items in a country where the copyright has expired.

Reusable Art only contains images that are copyright free in the United States and where the original author/illustrator has been dead for at least 70 years; making it a public domain work in all those countries who follow the Berne Convention or extend the copyright 70 years after the death of the creator. This means that except for the exceptions noted above and those countries where their copyright laws are listed as unknown, ALL of the images appearing on Reusable Art are in the public domain and may be used for any purpose.

We have included information as to where the artwork originally appeared both to honor their creators and to enable people to investigate the image's copyright status in countries that do not follow the Berne Convention or grant copyright beyond death plus 70 years. Again, every image on this site is in the public domain in the United States.

We hope you enjoy what we are building here and hope you can make use of the free public domain images presented here.

A word about the images posted on ReusableArt.com

We decided to leave the images in their original form rather than work with some of them to make them completely ready for your use. As many of you know with .jpg and other image types, each time a file is edited and resaved there is a certain level of degradation of the image's quality. There are a number of images that contain the original text or other content that would need to removed to use the image for your own work.

Our Copyrights

Since Reusable Art is a site comprised of art created by others that have gone into the public domain in the United States, we can legally make no claim on any individual image shared on this site.

However, when public domain materials are compiled together, that compilation can be copyrighted by the person who created the compilation. What that means is that while individual items appearing on Reusable Art are copyright free and in the public domain in the United States and most of the rest of the world, the collection of images as a whole are copyrighted to Reusable Art and may not be used in part or it's entirety without written permission from the owner of this site.

Additionally, all text appearing on this site is fully copyrighted by Reusable Art and may not be used without written permission from the owner of this site.

It takes quite a bit of research, time, and money to maintain this site and we hope you can understand our desire to protect our investment by respecting our own copyrights.