20 May 2026
Public domain is not a free-for-all
An artwork being out of copyright does not mean the file you found is safe to sell. We learned that the hard way — here are the three questions that actually decide it.
We sell restored classical artwork. Almost everything we touch is old enough that the underlying work is out of copyright. That fact is the beginning of the analysis, not the end of it — and confusing the two is the fastest way to lose a shop.
The sentence “this painting is public domain” and the sentence “we can sell this file” are not the same sentence. Between them sit at least three separate questions, and each one can independently kill a listing.
The work versus the file. The painting may be free. The photograph or scan of it may not be. Someone stood in a museum with a camera, or ran a plate through a drum scanner, and depending on jurisdiction and how much creative judgment went into that reproduction, that intermediate layer can carry its own rights. We are almost never sourcing from the original canvas. We are sourcing from a file someone else made.
The country. Public domain is not a global attribute. It is a per-jurisdiction status that depends on the author’s death date, the publication date, and a stack of local rules that don’t agree with each other. A work can be clear in the United States and not clear in France. We sell to both.
The platform. This is the one people forget. Even when we think we’re right, the platform gets a vote, and the platform’s vote is the only one that has an enforcement mechanism. Every marketplace applies its own policy, and it applies it to us, not to a legal abstraction.
We know this because it has happened to us.
We have had a Cassandre listing removed. We have had TfL/Underground poster designs deleted — the marks and the design heritage there are actively defended, and the lesson was that copyright and trademark do not run on the same clock. And on the other side of the ledger, USIA material is clear precisely because it was produced by a US government agency, which puts it in a different category from “old enough that nobody’s complaining.”
Those removals changed how we work. Every artwork’s rights status is now verified individually before it is listed, the decision is recorded, and a work that caused a problem once cannot quietly come back into the catalogue under a new name. We would rather lose a listing than argue about one — our copyright page says the same thing in more detail.
What we’re not saying
This is a one-person studio. We are not a legal department. Nothing here is legal advice, and we would be uncomfortable if anyone read it that way.
What we’re describing is an operational posture: assume public domain status is a claim that needs verifying rather than a property you can read off a Wikipedia infobox; assume the reproduction layer exists; assume the platform’s policy is the one that binds you; and catch a wrong assumption while it is still cheap, long before it reaches a shop.
We’ve been wrong before — Cassandre and TfL are what being wrong looks like, and both were survivable because nothing had scaled behind them. That’s really the whole design goal. Not being right every time. Being wrong cheaply, and writing down what happened so tomorrow’s decision is smarter than today’s memory.