Copyright is a complex subject that often gets far too little attention from authors. It’s easy to shy away from topics when they’re more difficult to grasp, but this is a subject where mastery conveys strong benefits to nearly every creator. 

The US Copyright Office defines copyright as “a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression.” That’s a start, but it’s the barest definition. Let’s try for a definition that’s a little stronger. Copyright grants a creator the exclusive right to display and distribute copies of their works. Those rights can be licensed to other people, such as when we give Amazon a license to sell our ebooks. In the US, copyrights owned by individuals last for seventy years after the death of the creator, after which the rights to use that material enter the public domain.

Copyright isn’t a monolith. Every nation has slight variations on how they approach copyright law. In the US, one cannot sue for infringement unless one has registered the copyright with the Copyright Office. In Germany, copyrights cannot be transferred from one person to another; the creator forever owns the copyright. 

Like books, covers are also generally protected by copyright, which places some legal restrictions on the authors who commission the artwork as much as it does readers who purchase the book. Let’s look at the nuances of that in more depth.

Is My Cover Protected by Copyright?

Virtually all book covers are protected by copyright. Once a work is created, it gains copyright protection immediately, from the moment of creation. Even in the US, registration is required in order to use the courts to sue someone; protections exist from the moment of creation, whether registered or not.

There’s a common misconception that covers made from multiple pieces of stock art “photo-bashed” into a composite piece do not gain copyright protections. That is, broadly speaking, untrue. When using stock images to make a cover, the type of usage determines whether the cover obtains copyright status; in order to gain copyright, the photo-bashed cover needs to make transformative changes to the images. The US Copyright Office defines transformative use as “those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work.” A transformative change could be something as simple as pasting a human into a landscape without people in it; that has transformed the nature and character of the image, and will almost always generate a copyright for the final image.

Covers made from single stock images will rarely gain copyright unless they have done substantial overpainting or in some other way modified the original image extensively enough to qualify as transformative use.

It’s also important to license the images you use. Like books, most stock images will have copyright protection. Ensure you’re getting legal commercial licenses for all images you use in your business, whether it be for a book cover or for any other purpose.

Who Owns My Cover?

Once we know whether a cover has copyright, the next question would be: Who owns it? The answer to that is pretty simple: Look at your contract with the artist.

Absent any written agreement, the artist who made a work will generally own the copyright. In most nations, a written agreement is required to transfer copyright from one person to another, so without a written agreement, the copyright is retained by the artist. Many artists prefer to work this way, and it’s not unusual for artists to charge extra if a client is asking for a transfer of copyright.

In the US and many other nations, these are typically called work-for-hire agreements. Such contracts stipulate that the copyright of the finished piece will belong to the person paying for the work and transfer the copyright from the creator to the buyer. Absent a work-for-hire agreement, the cover artist retains copyright, and the buyer acquires are use rights: the right to use the artist’s work in specific ways, for specific purposes, as outlined in the contract. Make sure to read and understand your contract with your cover artist completely, and always use a contract. Having a contract with your artist protects both parties from headaches down the road.

Should we credit the artist? Unless the contract requires it, there’s no legal obligation to provide credit, even if they’re the copyright holder. However, it is nice to do so and can really boost that artist’s career. Check with your artists, but most will be thrilled to have their name listed on the copyright page of your book.

AI Covers and Copyright

There’s a lot of confusion around AI images and how they interact with copyright, but it’s not actually as complicated as it sometimes sounds. The bottom line is fairly simple: In almost all nations, raw and unaltered AI images are public domain. That means they’re not protected by copyright, except in the UK, China, Japan, and New Zealand, all of which offer full copyright protection.

However, covers that use AI images can gain copyright through transformative use in the same manner as any other cover that uses public domain photos or images. For example, if an artist takes an AI image of a landscape and another AI image of a person, then pastes the person into the empty landscape, that’s almost certainly transformative use, as it has changed the message of the image. The US Copyright Office will grant copyright in virtually all such cases.

Mild fixes to an image are not sufficient to generate a copyright, and using a single AI image as a cover would create a public domain cover, in the same manner that using a single public domain photo would. Photo-bashing multiple AI images into a composite, however, will generate a copyright on the same basis that photo-bashing stock art will. In some cases, adding sufficient artistic typography to a single AI image can generate a copyright as well, as long as the cover typography can be deemed art in itself. 

Note that it is not safe to use an AI image someone else has generated for your covers, unless you license the use of the image. This is because AI images do have copyright protection in the UK, and if you use an image that has copyright in the UK for a product you sell globally, the person who made that image can sue for infringement in the UK courts, even if neither party lives there. The best practice is to always get a license for any images used in cover designs, whether AI or not.

For more reading on copyright and AI, visit the following resources:

For an understanding of US law surrounding copyright and AI, visit https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf.

For an understanding of UK copyright laws around generative AI, visit https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence/copyright-and-artificial-intelligence.

What About Fonts and Copyright?

Like images, the fonts you use for cover design are themselves protected by copyright. It’s important to ensure you have the proper commercial use rights for all fonts used on your covers. Many authors have landed themselves in hot legal waters by using a font they downloaded from somewhere without acquiring the legal right to use it commercially.

How do you know if you have the right to use a font? The good news is that in almost all cases, the fonts loaded into commercial software and operating systems are already licensed for commercial use. For example, all fonts installed as part of the Mac operating system are licensed for commercial use, as are all fonts installed with properly licensed Adobe products. If you own a legal Photoshop subscription, you can legally use any font installed with Photoshop on your covers. In most cases, the fonts installed with Windows are likewise allowed for commercial use. Be cautious, however, as some Home or Student editions may not be licensed for commercial use.

Most cover artists want to go beyond the fonts that come installed with operating systems and applications, and when doing so, it’s vital they acquire commercial licenses for such use. There are copious sites that have fonts for sale, including Font Squirrel, Adobe Fonts, and MyFonts. When hiring an artist, it’s also totally acceptable to ask them for screenshots of their license for any special fonts they used in the work.

Pro Tip: Book publishers will generally not need the more expensive license required to embed a font; that’s used for media like video games, where the font gets included in the download to the end user. Since that’s not done in books, it’s not a license we require.

Our Bread and Butter

For authors, like most artists, copyright is our bread and butter. It allows us the exclusive right to monetize our works and prevents other people from sharing our work for free. Gaining a deeper understanding of copyright is extremely important for an author. The Copyright Handbook: What Every Writer Needs to Know by Stephen Fishman offers a primer on the topic. Reading through that book will give any author a crash course on the fundamentals of how copyright works in our businesses.

Aside from encouraging deeper learning on this topic, I’ll close with a final thought. Since copyright is so important to our ability to sell our works, it’s equally important to respect the copyrights held by others. Ensuring that you have legally licensed all works you use is the legally sound and ethically sensible way to run your businesses. We don’t care for it when someone pirates our books, so let us be sure to give others’ work the same respect we want for our own.

Kevin McLaughlin

Kevin McLaughlin is the USA Today bestselling author of 83 books. He writes mostly science fiction and fantasy, and is also the author of The Coffee Break Novelist and You Must Write. He’s enjoyed reading and writing serials for decades.