Understanding the Rules: Using Creative Fabrica Artwork in KDP Book Production

a few months back I created two videos teaching people how to properly use third-party artwork that they purchased from sites like creative Fabrica to use in their KDP low and medium content books to sell on Amazon and since that time a few concerns that some of you have had have been brought to my attention as to whether or not what I was advising my viewers to do in those videos actually fell within the terms of use of creative fabrica's commercial licensing agreement now I created those videos based on my own interpretation of what I read in that agreement and if I'm being honest there was a point where I doubted that interpretation based simply on how vague and somewhat confusing the wording of that agreement actually was but I went ahead and created those videos anyway and just decided to trust my instincts and then when I heard that some of you were having doubts as to whether or not my interpretation of that agreement was correct I decided that it was time to contact creative Fabrica directly to get a clear and definite answer once and for all so what I did was submit two of my videos for their legal team to watch just so that there would be absolutely no confusion as to what I was advising my viewers to do with their products so in this video using creative fabrica's response to me I'm going to go over their commercial licensing agreement and I'm going to break it down in a way that makes it much easier to understand so that you can continue using their artwork in your KDP book projects with confidence sorry [Music] hey guys Craig here hope everybody's doing well okay so a few weeks back I reached out to my contact at creative Fabrica to try and get a much clearer understanding of the terms of use in their commercial licensing agreement and when I fired off this email I included links to both of my creative Fabric and videos so that they could get a better understanding of where I was coming from now I'm going to go over their response to me but before I do that I just want to quickly go over creative fabric because commercial licensing agreement so that you can get a much better idea of where all the confusion was coming from before I get started I just want to point out that I'm not a lawyer so don't take what I'm about to tell you as law I'm simply giving you my interpretation of creative fabrica's licensing agreement and I'm presenting you with the information that they have given to me personally so if there's something that you're unsure about and you're worried that it could result in some type of financial or legal issue for you down the road then I strongly suggest that you contact a lawyer that being said let's get started now creative fabka actually has two separate licensing agreements one is for the individual products and the other is for subscriptions the only major difference between the two is that when it comes to single purchases you have the right to continue creating products with the designs that you've purchased forever but with a subscription license although you can continue selling the products that you've already created indefinitely you're not allowed to create new pod products after you have canceled your subscription so for the purpose of this video I'm just going to focus on the single sales license but just know that everything that I'm about to talk about here applies equally to both licenses okay so I think that the first area of confusion arises with the separation of the physical and digital end products and the print-on-demand products and the reason for this is because for all intensive purposes books published through KDP are both physical products as far as paper books are concerned as well as digital products when you're referring to books published for the Kindle reader so many users read these first two sections of the license agreement and then go on their merry way creating pod products not realizing that although most of these terms do in fact apply to pod products they're not the only terms that govern them you actually have to scroll down the page to see the print on demand terms of use now there are actually two sets of pod terms one is referred to the basic pod usage and the other is the full pod usage I'm going to focus on the second set first with the full print on demand usage license you can actually use the designs that you download from creative Fabrica as is without modifying them and that's the major difference between these two pod agreements the reason that I want to focus on this one first is because I want to point out that when it comes to using full coloring page illustrations as is without modifying them in any way even though creative Fabrica is granting you a commercial license to do that doesn't necessarily mean that Amazon will allow you to upload your book to the Amazon Marketplace containing those unmodified images you see there are a lot of customers purchasing these coloring pages but not all of them are purchasing them to create medium content books to sell on Amazon some customers may just be purchasing them for personal use While others may have their own little bookstore or activity booth at a local flea market where they sell this type of children's content and they're just looking for books that have a larger profit margin so they create their own that being said there are probably at least a few customers who are using these unmodified designs in coloring books to sell on Amazon now if you create a coloring book that contains the exact same illustrations that another coloring book already published on Amazon also contains even though your book's cover is entirely different there's still a pretty good chance that KDP will reject your book when you try to upload it and even if they don't there's always the chance that a customer could complain down the road about the fact that they purchase two different coloring books only to find out that they have the exact same illustrations inside of them and this would result in Amazon removing the book that was published last as well as possibly suspending the account of the seller who use the duplicate content because this is an action that is strictly prohibited under Amazon's terms of use and it's for this very reason that I don't recommend that you use any unmodified coloring pages in your KDP medium content books if your plan is to sell on Amazon it's also the reason that I created these two videos on how to properly use third-party artwork within KDP low and medium content books I'll put a link to both of these videos at the end of this one so for this video I'm just going to focus on the basic print-on-demand usage agreement which does require you to modify the designs before you use them it's this agreement here that pretty much covers all of the kdb print-on-demand books whether they're low medium or high content and just know that if you're creating designs to print on apparel glassware beach towels or whatever and you're planning on selling products on sites like Redbubble Amazon merch or Zazzle these are the terms of use that you need to follow okay so let's just start off by reading what we can and what we can't do Under This licensing agreement so the first thing we can do is create and upload crafts and Graphics to pod sites that are vastly different from the original this means they have unique distinctive elements that are added by you now this word vastly is where a lot of the confusion starts because who determines what level of change is considered vast now they give you an example down here and I'm going to come back to that in just a second but for now let's just keep reading okay so the second thing we're allowed to do is use fonts to create quotes sentences word art Etc and upload those designs to pod sites so this little slogan I am mermaidsing is an example of how you can use the fonts that you download from creative fabrico the next term of use is that you're allowed to generate unlimited sales via pod sites so that's good because that means that there's no limit to the amount of books we can sell using these graphics and finally you can ship valid pod products worldwide which basically means that you're allowed to sell your KDP books in all of the countries that Amazon normally sells books in okay so those are all the things that we're allowed to do Under This licensing agreement but the real confusion starts with the things that we're not allowed to do now I just want to say that when I created both of my creative fabric of videos I was basing the teachings in those videos on my artistic interpretation of this next section and as you'll see a little later on in the video my interpretation wasn't very far off now the first two terms are what's causing most of the confusion whereas the last two terms are pretty straightforward you can upload font files to pod sites and you can't upload patterns to pod sites and the reason for this is because those artists still hold the copyright for them and only those who hold the copyright can legally Grant the right of commercial use to a third party so using the fonts as an example you can download a font from creative Fabrica and use it to create a design like this one that says I am amazing and you could print that design on products like books t-shirts mugs and so on and then sell those items as finished products to the public what you can't do is upload the font file that you downloaded from creative Fabrica to a pod site so that they would be able to use the fonts as well by doing that you would be giving the Pod site access to the funds without having to purchase them which would be a violation of that artist's copyrights and a violation of the terms of use of this commercial licensing agreement the same goes for patterns you can use a pattern as part of your design to sell on a finished product but you can't sell the pattern by itself on the product or sell it for someone else to use and their products commercially or otherwise doing that would also be a copyright violation so those last two terms are pretty straightforward but the first two terms are where it really gets confusing for some people so the first term states that you are not allowed to Simply upload designs without adding distinctive new design elements the words that you're going to want to focus on here are distinctive design elements but before we do that let's read the second term you are not allowed to combine multiple products to create a new design and sell that and this is where the confusion starts and the reason for that confusion is because at first glance these two statements seem to completely contradict each other the first statement is telling you that you have to add additional Design Elements to your new design well the second statement is telling you that you're not allowed to combine multiple products to create a new design now although that does sound somewhat confusing once you understand what they actually mean by that it's really not that complicated let me give you a few examples but before I do that I just want to point out that when they say you must add distinctive new design elements they're not saying that you necessarily have to add in additional illustrations to your final artwork before you upload it to a pod site they're saying that you must significantly change the design elements of that piece of artwork that you downloaded from creative Fabrica so that it is no longer competition for the original design that you downloaded let me explain you see the first statement is referring to design elements whereas the second statement is referring to products those two things are not one and the same a product is something that you purchase and download from the creative Fabrica website products can consist of designs illustrations Graphics patterns fonts backgrounds book Interiors as well as anything else you can find on this site but an element is simply an aspect of a particular design so there are seven different elements of design when it comes to Art and they are line color shape form value space and texture now if we look at this mermaid design that they've given us as an example you can see that the original design is just basic silhouette it has one color which is black it only has one value and that's dark the texture is solid and the overall shape of the design is somewhat triangular now if we look at the altered design you can see that they've added multiple colors and if I change this image to black and white you can see that by adding in multiple colors they have also added in multiple tones to the value by placing a pattern overlay on the image they're also changing the texture of the design and the background that they've added also changes the shape of the overall design from triangular to oval so they've changed the color value texture and shape of the original design by adding in these four distinctive new design elements now if you're wondering what makes them distinctive it's the fact that these new elements are not present in the original image and because of these changes this new image is no longer competition for the original image now some of you may be thinking well that's all fine and dandy but I'm working with black line art coloring book illustrations that are printed in black and white so I don't really want to change the color value or texture of my design and that's true when it comes to coloring book illustrations you should definitely keep the liner solid black but you can change the elements of line shape and space in that type of illustration but before I get into how to do that I just want to go back to this second term that states that you're not allowed to combine multiple products to create a new design and sell that what they mean by this is that you're not allowed to just purchase three separate illustrations or products place them on one page and then place that illustration into a medium content coloring book and call it a new design because it's not you haven't altered these products or added unique Design Elements to them in any way you just place them onto one page I could pull all three of these designs off of this page and they would still look exactly the same as the three original illustrations you downloaded which makes them competition for the original products you have to add distinctive new design elements to the illustrations that you use before you can use them so using the illustrations that I downloaded from creative Fabric or for my video on how to create unique coloring book pages you can see that these three illustrations are three separate designs four products if you will now the overall design of these images consists of the entire illustration so if I was just to put two or more of these illustrations onto one page and call it a new design that would be a violation of creative fabrica's commercial licensing agreement and that's because they haven't been modified and therefore are not vastly different from the original images and because of the fact that I haven't added any distinctive new design elements to them either so if we look at this first image to make using this illustration legal I first need to modify it and in doing so add new design elements to it this design as it is right now is a vertical rectangle shape but if I was to erase all of this top artwork I would be changing the shape of the overall design from a vertical rectangle to a horizontal rectangle and in doing so would be adding a distinctive new design element which is shaped to this product if I was to go one step further and erase this Shell at the bottom of the page I would be adding more space to this illustration and space is an element of design therefore I'm adding in a distinctive new design element to this product and what makes it distinctive is the fact that the space wasn't in the original image it was added now could I just paste this remaining line art onto a new document and leave the image like that and sell it as it is in a KDP book no and that's because it wasn't modified to appear vastly different from the original it still looks like a derivative of the original product that I downloaded so how do I overcome this I do it by continuing to add additional distinctive new design elements to it now if I go over to my second image and erase all of the content that I don't want from this design I'm now modifying this design as well as changing the elements of shape and space once I paste this octopus illustration into my new document I'm once again adding in distinctive new elements of design by partially covering up these C tubes with my octopus character I'm actually changing the line element of this coral reef illustration line elements refer to how line art is used to divide up space on a page by interrupting the flow of the line art of these C tubes I'm introducing distinctive new design elements to this overall design and as I continue to add in new artwork I continue to change the design elements of this piece by adding in a fish I'm changing the element of space of this design by adding in a seashell I'm doing the same thing and because the seashell and these three bubbles are the only artwork that I'm going to use from this design I'm vastly modifying this product as well and as I start to rearrange and layer all of this artwork into my new document I'm continuing to add distinctive new elements of design to my final piece by placing the bubbles on top of this octopus's head I'm changing the element of space in that illustration and by positioning a bubble directly onto the line art of the octopus I'm changing the line element of that illustration as well which means that I'm adding a distinctive new design element to that illustration that wasn't in the original image once I finished adding in all of the artwork that I'm going to use you can see that this new design is vastly different from any of the original Three products that I used to create it so I'm meeting all of creative fabrica's commercial licensing requirements I'm uploading a graphic that is vastly different than the original products that I downloaded I'm adding distinctive new elements that aren't present in any of the original images and I'm not just combining multiple products together on a page I'm using modified pieces of those products to create a new design so now comes the million dollar question what is creative fabric I think about my interpretation well as I said earlier I sent an email to my contact at creative Fabrica whose name is Clyde and I included a link to two of my videos that demonstrate how I recommend that people should use artwork that they download from the creative Fabrica website in their kdb projects now Clyde passed those videos on to the legal team at creative Fabrica to get their opinion as to my interpretation of their commercial licensing agreement and after about a week Clyde got back to me with this response now the first part of this email was pretty much what I expected to get back and that's a basic regurgitation of their commercial licensing agreement it read like this I passed your examples and spoke to the team and here is their response generally significantly modified means that the finished product should not compete with the original designs downloaded from creative Fabrica our team normally suggests that users add multiple design elements of their own and that simply combining pre-existing elements does not count as significant change however for book related pod uses they say that you can use our graphics and crafts without editing so as long as you've added some of your own content to the book okay so again a very vague definition that really doesn't clear anything up when they use terms like our team normally suggests the word normally insinuates that there are times that they don't suggest doing this or when they say you can use our graphics and crafts without editing so as long as you've added some of your own content to your book okay well page numbers are content so if I add page numbers to my book then can I use your graphics without editing them and just to be perfectly clear I don't recommend doing that the point I'm trying to make is that all companies intentionally word these agreements in a way that won't deter you from purchasing their products but at the same time should anything go wrong will give them the ability to flip the definition to their advantage but it was this next paragraph that caught my attention I understand some products may not be very suitable for editing as they may already be finished designs rather than design assets based on the suggested article I'd say that your end design is very different from the original design that you downloaded so this is basically cly who's a higher up representative for Creative Fabrica saying that after watching my video feels that what I am doing in the video is fine but clay also included one more resource from the creative Fabrica website to further clarify the response now as you can see from the URL this article that I'm quoting from is located directly on the help page of creative Falco's own website and I'll put a link to this page in the description section of this video in the article that I'm quoting is on the usage rights of the basic pod license so if I scroll down to where they actually give an example you can see that it's a little different from the example that they gave with the mermaid in this example the downloaded design is the dog illustration based on the terms of their commercial license agreement you can't just place that dog illustration on the cover of a book with a little bit of text and call it a new design this would be a violation of their agreement but if you add in some additional Design Elements to the background then you're fine now what's important here is the wording in the paragraph directly below the example the first sentence states in the example above the other elements tree bench Sun Etc should be your own original designs now this is very important their use of the word should indicates that this is just a suggestion doing this was mandatory then they would have used the word must as in the other elements must be your own designs but they're not they're using the word should which means that they recommend that the other designs be your own but it's not set in stone but it's the next sentence that gives the clearest definition it is not allowed to combine multiple downloads without making any modifications to create a new design as the individual designs would still be comparable with the original design their use of the word without brings it all home what they're clearly stating here is that you cannot combine multiple downloads together unless you modify them first so that they are no longer comparable to the original design so what they're saying is you can combine multiple downloads together to create a new design just as long as you modify each of them first to the point where they are no longer comparable to the original design which is exactly what I'm doing in my videos so does this mean that if you just do what I'm telling you to do in my videos that you will never run into any legal issues with your KDP book projects unfortunately no whenever you're using third-party artwork or even AI generated artwork there was always going to be the possibility of copyright issues one of my subscribers Sue found this out the hard way after placing an image on her cover that she legally generated using an AI image generator her book was rejected by Amazon because she couldn't prove the copyright of the image even though she was able to show them her commercial license from the AI software that she used it didn't matter with AI imagery beginning to flood these marketplaces and no real definitive copyright laws in place to govern it there is going to be a shitstorm of legal activity coming over the next few years and Amazon as well as every other platform like them is going to do everything they can to cover their asses from being sued there are court cases going on right now as we speak that are trying to establish legislation for AI generated artwork and if that legislation falls in the favor of the artists which it could very well do then there are going to be a lot of changes coming up as to how you can use AI generated artwork in your commercial projects and the only way to truly avoid all of this drama is to only use original artwork that you've drawn yourself but if that's not something that you're capable of doing at this time then the next best thing is just to do what I'm showing you how to do in all of my creative Fabric and videos copyright laws as they pertain to artists are very clear when a new piece of artwork clearly appears to be a derivative of another existing piece of artwork then this is deemed to be copyright infringement so using those laws as a benchmark when using third-party artwork you want to try and make sure that the piece you're creating is at least design wise as far away from the original artwork as it can possibly be and just know that based on the sheer size of creative fabrica's inventory and the amount of artwork that they've licensed for use in commercial projects over the past seven years without incurring thousands of copyright violation cases it's a pretty good sign that if you follow their guidelines then you should be just fine and if you're interested in Saving over 80 percent on a yearly subscription to creative Fabrica then be sure and check out my exclusive offers in the description section of this video now if you're new to my channel and you're not quite sure how to use creative Fabrica artwork in your KDP projects then be sure and check out part one and part two of my video series how to create unique coloring books to sell on Amazon you can find a link to both of those videos right here until next time take care

Channel: Craig Babin

Views: 20,851

Keywords: Craig Babin, Doodle Art, Doodling, Passive Income, Hobbies, Artist, Doodlist, Doodle Artist, Tutorials, How To Videos, YouTube Creator, Creative Fabrica, Commercial Licensing Agreement, KDP, Medium Content Books, Self Publishing, Amazon, Low Content Books, Desktop Publishing

Id: slPwJazU3Kw

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023