Copyright (or lack thereof)
I get asked fairly often whether it’s okay to reuse fortunes found here. I’m heartened that anyone should ask. It means some of you readers have at least a basic appreciation for plagiarism, why it is bad, how to avoid it, and all that.
Oddly, several of the requests have been from people who are apparently writing theses about fortune cookies. I’m not sure what that implies about the state of our higher education system. I’ve been trying not to think too much about it.
Anyway… there are two answers to your question:
Can you reuse these images? Yes.
The fortunes aren’t mine. I did not create them. I have posted photos of them, I have gone to the trouble of organizing them in an eye-pleasing manner, and I have added witty commentary which you are free to discuss around the office water cooler or print on your wedding invitations. But the fortunes themselves were published (or printed, or whatever) by someone else. Therefore it would be out of place for me to grant permission to reuse them.
I’m not really sure if they belong to anybody at all. If they do, it’s undoubtedly the company that prints the fortunes in the first place, but who that is, there is no way for me to know. They push enough of them out the door — without any indication of where they came from, who printed them, or who wrote them — that as far as I can tell the fortunes themselves are pretty much public domain. If anybody reading this works for a fortune cookie manufacturer, and I’m wrong about this, then please let me know. Also tell me what it’s like to work at a fortune cookie company, with particular focus on how effectively it gets the chicks.
For that matter, if anybody reading this is a lawyer that has had some experience with copyright law as it pertains to fortune cookies, then I urge you to write in. Not only can you help us all by clarifying the law, I think yours is a story we would all dearly love to hear.
The bottom line is that if you want to use these fortunes (the images or their text) in some way, go ahead. If it’s convenient I would appreciate it if you note that you found them here (www.weirdfortunecookies.com). But don’t give me credit for actually coming up with the fortunes, because I didn’t, and I really have no idea who did.
Naturally you should not reuse any of the witty commentary stuff without giving me credit, since that technically is my original work and I’d have to come to your house and beat you up. Just kidding. Maybe.
To sum up:
- Feel free to use the text of the fortunes.
- Feel free to copy the images of the fortunes.
- Please mention where you found them if it is at all possible.
- Tell me you used them and what for.
- Don’t do anything weasel-ish, like copy my website, or recreate my site by posting all the images with my captions replaced by yours, or wriggle your nose really fast while making squeaking sounds.
Thank you.
If you want to use the pictures, please make COPIES of them.
The following is about using images on your own website/blog/whatever. If you’re printing pictures or sticking them into a Word document or anything like that, it doesn’t apply to you.
There are a couple of easy ways to grab images from here:
- Make a copy of the picture and post it on your own website. Right-click the image and pick “Save Picture As…” or whatever.
- Use one of the the excellent and free image hosting services such as ImageShack.
Some people are tempted to include photos on web pages by putting a little <img> tag in the page and setting the source to my website. Your audience then downloads pictures from my site as they read your site. This is called “hotlinking”. It’s considered extremely rude internet behavior and it costs me actual physical real-life money, since each time the image gets transferred it uses up some of my monthly bandwidth quota. And you know what? This is a bandwidth-poor site! There is no way I’m going to fork over extra money to pay for more network bandwidth for a website called “Weird Fortune Cookie Collection”. I don’t care how much attention the site gets, that’s just wrong.