@discontinuity "I am publishing for commercial purposes and would like to have artwork that is 100% in the clear" is a problem solved by "money" whether paid to artists or paid to copyright lawyers who can hem and haw over whether your collage falls under fair use protections
@0xabad1dea totally fair. In this case the conferences were volunteer run and totally not for profit and nobody was getting paid, so the "commercial purposes" doesn't seem to fit. I agree totally with what you're trying to say it just looks like there's an uptick in jerk law firms doing copyright trolling and idk what I'm comfortable publishing on my (not at all for commercial purposes) personal website anymore :(
Some people have decided to advise conference speakers to only use AI generated images due to this, which I think is crap for the reasons in your first post on the thread. (If you didn't write it, I don't want to read/listen to it.)
Obviously you're both not a lawyer and not a copyright troll and not the Internet's Oracle and I'm in no way asking you to solve this or answer it completely!
Just a data point for folks who might be afraid of copyright troll law firms that this seems to be a real risk.
But I do love your pictures with stickers :)