Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when we treat the past like a stock library

Given that I’m a graphic designer, most people would be surprised by just how much time I spend thinking about the law. Maybe that’s an inevitable side effect of working with so much found material. Or maybe it’s because I grew up with a lawyer for a dad, which meant hearing more about the law as a pre-teen than most people will in a lifetime. He talked about all kinds of legal oddities (tree law is still a personal favorite), but copyright seemed to come up a lot in his anecdotes – like whether a middle school could legally put on Aladdin or if a branded can of soup could appear on The View. I’ve always relied on his expertise for my own progressively labyrinthine questions. Can I make a collage with a photo that’s technically not public domain but from a defunct company? How much do I have to change something for it to be considered fair use? What the hell is Creative Commons? After years of my badgering, he finally got ahead of the problem and wrote me a nine-page memo breaking down copyright law – what it covers, what it doesn’t, and how to avoid getting sued. But, while I hate to admit it, I mostly ignored it (sorry, Dad). Not because it wasn’t useful, but because the law has never been the driving factor in what archival imagery I choose to borrow from.

I don’t let legality solely dictate my source material because copyright law is a mess – arbitrary, restrictive, and designed to protect corporations over artists. If you ask most people what copyright is for, they’ll tell you it’s about protecting artists. But it wasn’t created to ensure artists got paid, it was only meant to incentivise creative work by granting a temporary monopoly to its creator. By limiting control to a set period, the system was supposed to encourage production while guaranteeing that works would eventually enter the public domain for collective use. Case in point: when the US first implemented copyright in 1790 (inspired by similar laws in Britain), protection lasted just 14 years, with a one-time renewal for another 14. It was never meant to be indefinite. Early lawmakers saw copyright as a tradeoff – short-term exclusivity in exchange for long-term public access. As a federal appeals court put it in Authors Guild v. Google Inc. (2015), “while authors are undoubtedly important intended beneficiaries of copyright, the ultimate, intended beneficiary is the public.” What was meant to serve both creators and the public has been undone. For nearly two centuries, copyright terms remained limited. But in 1976, Congress extended them to 75 years or the life of the author plus 50. In 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act – dubbed the ‘Mickey Mouse Protection Act’ for keeping early Disney works out of the public domain – pushed it further: 95 years after publication or the life of the author plus 70. A temporary incentive has turned into near-permanent control.

While there hasn’t been another major term extension since the 1998 Sonny Bono Act, corporate influence over copyright enforcement has deepened in other ways, through aggressive litigation, digital restrictions, and the expansion of corporate control over creative work. Publishing houses, record labels, and film studios continue to lobby for longer copyright terms – not to ensure artists get paid, but to guarantee indefinite ownership. Meanwhile, independent creators rarely have the resources to defend their work. Take Alex Norris, creator of Webcomic Name, who has spent years in a legal battle after signing a contract to develop a board game based on their comic. The publisher later claimed ownership of Webcomic Name itself, leading Norris to sue. Despite multiple rulings in their favour, the fight has dragged on, draining time, energy, and money – forcing Norris to crowdfund legal fees just to protect their own work. Or look to the Internet Archive, which was sued by Hachette Publishers for expanding its digital lending system during Covid, letting readers borrow digitised copies of books that libraries already owned. A study later showed the lending program had no measurable impact on book sales, but Hachette pressed forward anyway; they cared about loss of control, not loss of revenue. Instead of safeguarding creators, copyright now favours whoever has the resources to outlast their opponent in a legal battle.

With heritage aesthetics trending and copyright laws as restrictive as ever, designers are increasingly looking to the public domain (works that are not copyrighted and are free to use, remix, and sell) as the perfect way to reference the past without worrying about legal red tape. Some work enters the public domain because it was never protected in the first place, like anything created by the US government, which is automatically free to use. Other work becomes public domain when its copyright expires (which does happen eventually, even under today’s restrictive terms). In 2025, that means works from 1929 became fair game, including A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the song Singin' in the Rain, Wassily Kandinsky's painting Upward, M. C. Escher’s Strada di Scanno, and the first design of the Barcelona chair.

Unfortunately, the accessibility of public domain material is also its downfall. The ease of use means it often gets reduced to a stylistic shortcut rather than something engaged with in full, chosen for its current associations rather than its original meaning. A medieval painting once represented a stoic act of religious devotion; now, it evokes arcane mysticism and dark ennui. A Victorian botanical print was once a cutting-edge tool of scientific discovery, cataloguing newly identified species; now, it’s a decorative flourish that signals elegance and refinement. These images carry built-in meaning, allowing designers to wield their associations without engaging with their history. And because they already look polished, they eliminate the time, effort, and expense of creating something new from scratch – not to mention the time spent building its associative meaning from the ground up. So why commission an illustrator when you can pull something free from an archive?

Book covers in particular have recently become a hotbed for recycled archival imagery. Rather than commissioning illustrators, publishers are increasingly relying on public domain Audubon prints, zoological sketches, and Renaissance etchings to populate cover art – not out of an embrace of history, but because it’s cheaper and faster than hiring an artist. Of course, the same styles they love from these old images would be especially difficult (and expensive) to replicate today, given that fewer illustrators still specialise in etching, engraving, or lithography. Of course, it’s those neglecting to commission work that have created a vacuum for these kinds of technical skills. Much of this is functional. Traditional media is inherently harder to revise; once an etching is done, it’s done. Unlike digital artwork, where changes can be made at any stage, historic techniques require early sign-off and a degree of trust in the artist’s vision. If a last-minute marketing push calls for a brighter flower or a rearranged composition, swapping one public domain print for another is far easier than waiting for an artist to redraw it. As a result, more and more, graphic design has begun to resemble collage: a patchwork of AI-generated textures, pre-made renderings, repurposed signage, and public domain imagery. Rather than referencing the past, designers are stripping it for parts to be mixed and matched – treating design history like a visual junkyard (or maybe a reanimated corpse).

In a design landscape where public domain materials are endlessly repurposed, a new business model has emerged around their distribution: companies that don’t sell historic materials themselves, but interfaces for finding them. These platforms claim to help users discover, collect, and organise imagery from across the internet, usually alongside overwrought manifestos about “a new way of mapping information” or making “free expression possible for every curator”. Some go a step further, offering public domain search tools that pull from institutions like the Met and the New York Public Library – but when you click an image, it redirects you to their platform rather than the original source, a deliberate friction point that traps users in their ecosystem instead of directing them to the non-profits that actually house the work. One such platform reached out to me directly this year, offering to build a “personalised” space by pulling images from my Instagram and Are.na boards (a user-funded image collection site that’s been around for over a decade). The fact that their onboarding pitch involved locking freely shared content behind a walled garden was telling – there was nothing new on offer, just open resources rebranded as premium products. Stock image sites do much of the same, without even bothering with the lofty rhetoric of a manifesto. They’ve always been about outsourcing creative labour, so naturally, they’ve turned to the public domain to sidestep even more artists. I found a single page of Byzantine ornament listed for $33 on one site, conveniently omitting any mention of The Grammar of Ornament, the book it came from – available for free, in full, on The Internet Archive.

But archival material doesn’t appear online by accident. The vast digital landscape of vintage scans, lost media, and ephemeral design exists because people –both professional and amateur – dedicate their time to collecting, cataloguing, and preserving it. Hobbyist archivists are responsible for a massive amount of the media we consume online; if you’ve ever watched a YouTube video about lost childhood media or referenced an obscure candy wrapper in a design project, you likely owe that discovery to someone like Jason Liebig – self-described as “The Indiana Jones of Snacks” and America’s foremost candy historian – who has spent years meticulously scanning and documenting packaging design (if you get one thing out of this column, it’s that you should be using Flickr, where most of the best ephemera is being shared by people like Jason.) Meanwhile, professional archivists and librarians – the ones who digitise and tag public domain materials for institutions – are also being erased from the equation. Their work, often underpaid and underfunded, is what makes public domain content accessible in the first place, yet some of the aforementioned platforms extract from these resources while contributing nothing back (unlike non-profit organisations like the People’s Graphic Design Archive or the Public Domain Image Archive).

The same system that lets companies profit off the public domain and decades of creative theft also enables AI firms to scrape public domain material without credit, compensation, or regard for its original context. Meta, for example, illegally downloaded over 80 terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, and Z-Library to train its AI – an act of mass-scale data extraction that will go unpunished. Meanwhile, in 2010, activist and programmer Aaron Swartz downloaded just 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR to share with the public – less than 0.1% of Meta’s dataset – and faced wire fraud charges, 35 years in prison, and a million-dollar fine. He took his own life in 2013.

Meanwhile in the UK, the government is currently proposing a data mining exemption be given to AI companies – meaning they would be able to use all artists’ work to train their AIs without permission or paying royalties (unless right holders have ‘expressly reserved their rights’). Campaigners and critics of the proposal include Paul McCartney and film director Beeban Kidron, who told The Guardian it would lead to a “wholesale” transfer of wealth from the creative industries to the tech sector.

This logic doesn’t just shape corporate extraction. It also trickles down to everyday artists and consumers, reinforcing the assumption that historical materials are free for the taking. When musician Clairo’s Herd Tee was revealed to have borrowed a design from an old Latvian film, fans rushed to defend it, not by arguing fair use or reinterpretation, but by insisting authorship no longer mattered. “What’s the problem? It’s a cute design and it’s from an old movie,” one comment read. Another argued, “It’s from the 1950s, the OG artist is dead now so what’s the problem… she never claimed it as her own, she just never stated that it was someone else’s work.” The problem, of course, was that the artist wasn’t dead – she’s 82, still working, and still very much alive to see her work resurface without credit. The assumption wasn’t that her work had entered the public domain – it was that age alone erased ownership, and that credit only matters if an artist is still around to demand it.

Not all borrowing is the same. The logic that “if it’s old, it’s fair game” gets applied indiscriminately, as if the passage of time alone erases authorship. But copying is often more about power than propriety. When working with archival material myself, I like to think in terms of the stand-up comedy rule: punching up vs. punching down. Picking up visual motifs from a billion-dollar corporation that’s built its empire on copyright hoarding? That’s punching up. Repackaging the work of a living artist from a marginalised background without credit or compensation? Likewise, using found material for an indie zine is a far cry from pulling from the same source for a corporate client that could easily afford to commission something new.

I don’t mean to dissuade anyone from using archival material. Quite the opposite – I’ve built most of my career around it! A lot of my work involves a mix of historical references, from my work with Pentagram on Minx, a TV show about a 70s porn magazine that leaned heavily on my collection of vintage erotica (don’t ask), to The New Antiquarians, a book about young collectors I designed for Monacelli and Phaidon that included a myriad of archivally derived touches. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that working with archival content – public domain or not – takes precision, intention, and care.

In the case of The New Antiquarians, since the book was about people who curate their homes from the past, it made sense to treat the book itself as a kind of collection – an assemblage of historical fragments, brought together in a way that felt personal rather than derivative. The challenge was making it feel archival without turning into pastiche, ensuring historical material added dimension rather than swallowing the design whole. A New Orleans-based collector’s chapter featured a border inspired by the wrought-iron porch fences of historically Black neighborhoods in Tremé. A couple with roots in both India and New England received a border that nodded to both Punjabi textiles and colonial-era quilting. Some elements were used as found, others were completely reworked – but in all cases, the reference points were chosen not just for their aesthetics, but for their relevance.

People ask me about copyright all the time, and will probably keep asking (especially after this article). I still don’t have a clear answer. A lot of it comes down to following your nose – deciding whether your borrowing is thoughtful or just convenient. I’ll keep trying to get it right for myself, and in the meantime, please don’t sue me.