Selling Digital Art On Etsy By Copying Public Domain Artwork

I ran into an interesting Etsy business North Prints a few weeks back that stuck in my head. One of the benefits of Etsy is that you can see how many sales a shop has and figure out what is popular. North Prints sells digital art, as in a file that you can print, with a focus on vintage artwork. The thing that interested me was that they had 286,000 sales! They have just under 1,100 prints and with a sales price of $4.23 that means the gross revenue of the shop is around $1.2 million. Over a million dollars for listing artwork and then having Etsy sending the customer a digital file. Now that’s a business!

Here’s the really interesting part though. In the description of the store it mentions “The vintage artwork in my shop has been remastered and altered from its original version, making each new derivative work unique to North Prints.” My interest is now peaked! So how much altering is required to say an artwork is now yours? I’ll leave you to go down the rabbit hole that is the legal concept of “derivative artwork” and make your own conclusions, but lets look at an example.

So as seen above we have a nice vintage print of three sheep. A quick search and you find that this is actually a “remastered and altered” version of “Ryelands Sheep, the King’s Ram, the King’s Ewe and Lord Somerville’s Wether by James Ward.

Besides a slight color filter it looks similar, but perhaps that’s my untrained eye.

Another quick search finds that other stores have also listed their own altered versions. Okay a few of these actually print the painting so there’s some value add there. But the business model of taking stock photos of old artwork, adjusting the work slightly and then listing it for digital resale is interesting. Not legal advice, but it appears that 70 years after an artist dies their work is part of the public domain and has less restrictions on it. So in the example above where James died in 1859 all of his art was public domain in 1929.

So these businesses are taking artwork that is old enough to ensure that they are public domain, adjusting it slightly and selling them as digital files on Etsy where people are looking for art for their walls. Not exactly a defensible business, but for some it appears to be working.

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