free clip art

Clip art usage is ruled by the terms of usage rights and individual copyright. It is important to understand the legalities of these two acts. Image rights are classified in three common groups, namely, ‘royalty free’, ‘rights managed’ and ‘public domain’.
Mostly commercial clip art is marketed via a limited royalty free license. This permits the client to use the clip art image for educational, personal and non-profit operations. Some clip art belongs to the royalty free segment. This implies limited commercial rights, meaning the permission to use art images for non-profit applications. Royalty free image rights are different for different vendors.

Another way of managing the market for fine art clip art is to sell it on a rights managed basis. This category of image rights has gone out of market in the last twenty years, royalty free licenses being a more popular mode of clip art marketing.
Public domain images prevail over other forms of clip art in popularity because the image rights are free for the same.

Many images are wrongly interpreted as belonging to the public domain but are actually part of copyright. It is not legal to put them to personal use without prior permission.  Confusion reigns in this area because as soon as an image from the public domain is edited or restructured, it becomes new, and this can be copyrighted by the editor.