Do We Need To Discuss What Is 'Art' And What Isn't?

[Bramblethorn]

However, there are tons of open source images in the world. And tons more images whose provenances an artist can't discover. For instance, a lot of porn images have been uploaded over and over again so many times, who knows if it has a copyright.

If it looks less than 35 years old - which is the case for almost all the porn stills people share in image threads here - the answer is almost certainly "yes, it does". Any film released after March 1 1989 is automatically covered by copyright for 70 years from the date of release, with a few exceptions e.g. films released into the public domain by their owner (unlikely, for porn) or films produced by the US Government (extremely unlikely, for porn). Films released before March 1989 might or might not still be in copyright, depending on whether the owners followed processes that were required back then. AFAIK the rules for still photos and other visual art are similar.

It doesn't lose that copyright no matter how many times somebody uploads it, and just because you don't know who owns it doesn't mean you're exempted from copyright rules. Kind of like buying brand new Reeboks for $50 from some guy who's selling them out of the back of a truck: you might not know where he got them, but you can be pretty sure that they aren't his to sell.

Something like the collage you posted might get away with a claim of "transformative work"; it'd seem reasonable to me, I don't know exactly where the line is drawn. But it doesn't hinge on whether or not you know the source of the photo.

 

[Otto26]

To that end, we DO NOT publish works of any type featuring the following content:

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>Copyrighted material for which the submitter is not the owner of the copyright, or for which the submitter does not have an explicit license from the copyright owner to publish the work at Literotica.
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https://www.literotica.com/resources/content-guidelines

Literotica also, in my experience, does not publish the works for which the submitter has an explicit license from the copyright owner (where the submitter and the copyright owner are two different people).