Image rights at LiveArt.

Every artwork record on LiveArt is built around three layers:

• The data layer — auction records, prices, dates, dimensions, mediums, provenance notes. This is factual market information, much of it drawn from public auction results going back to 1986.
• The image layer — a reference photograph of the work, displayed at a resolution sufficient to identify the piece but well below what would be useful for reproduction. This is the layer covered by this policy.
• The analytical layer — LiveArt Estimate™ valuations, index positions, market momentum, comparable sales, similarity scores. This is LiveArt's own proprietary output, derived from but distinct from the underlying images and records.

Only the first and third layers are LiveArt's intellectual property. The image layer carries the rights of the original artist, estate, photographer, or other rights holder, and we treat it that way.

A practical note before the three categories below. LiveArt's catalogue is aggregated from more than three thousand sources — auction houses, galleries, museums, public records, image services, and our own primary research. The reality is that source records vary in the rights information they carry. Some auction lots and gallery records include copyright notices or rights-holder attribution; many don't. An auction lot result will give us the artist, title, date, medium, and price; whether it also identifies the copyright holder depends on the source.

So in most cases the rights classification of a work is ours, inferred from the artist data we do have. If we know the artist died more than seventy years ago and the work is two-dimensional, we classify the work as public domain. If the artist is alive or recently deceased, we infer that rights reside with the artist or the artist's estate. Where the artist is identified only as “attributed to” or “circle of,” or where authorship is unknown, we say so honestly rather than guess.

This is best-effort inference, not verified clearance, and we present it as such. We think this is the most honest way to operate a reference catalogue at this scale: be transparent about what we know, what we infer, and what we don't, and make it straightforward for rights holders to correct anything we have wrong. If you are the rights holder for a work in our catalogue and our classification of it is incorrect, the contact details below are the fastest way to fix it.

Different works call for different treatment, and we group them as follows.

Public domain. Faithful photographic reproductions of two-dimensional works that are themselves in the public domain — typically works by artists who died more than 70 years ago, though the exact term varies by jurisdiction — do not give rise to a new copyright in the reproduction. We rely on this principle for our public-domain holdings.

Fair-use reference. For works that remain in copyright, we display reference images at a resolution suited to identification and analysis, accompanied by attribution and copyright notice. We do this in reliance on fair use under U.S. law, fair dealing under U.K. and Commonwealth law, and analogous doctrines elsewhere, on the basis that the reference is transformative — used as part of an analytical and informational service that does not substitute for the market in the work itself. The reasoning here is the same that supports search-engine thumbnails, illustrated reference books, and museum catalogues: identification and reference is a use that the market for the original work is not.

Customers accessing LiveArt's reference images through our website, mobile applications, or API are permitted to use them for identification, authentication, provenance research, cataloguing, valuation, appraisal, insurance, lending, due diligence, and internal market analysis. Customers operating under a separate written agreement may also be authorized to display images within their own client-facing applications, subject to attribution and the other terms set out in that agreement.

Reference use is not a license to reproduce. The following are not permitted under any LiveArt subscription or API access, regardless of tier:

• Reproducing reference images in advertising, marketing, editorial, or promotional materials
• Publishing, broadcasting, or publicly distributing reference images in any form
• Selling, redistributing, or sublicensing the images to third parties
• Creating prints, posters, merchandise, or other physical or digital reproductions
• Using the images to train, fine-tune, evaluate, or benchmark machine learning models or AI systems — this prohibition applies whether the images are used alone or combined with other data, and regardless of the proportion of training data they constitute
• Removing or altering copyright notices, watermarks, attribution, or rights metadata

Any of these uses requires a license obtained directly from the rights holder.

To support enforcement of these terms, images served by LiveArt may carry invisible forensic provenance marks. These marks are imperceptible, do not alter the appearance of the work, and assert no rights in the underlying work — they exist solely to establish whether a given copy originated from LiveArt's services.

We do not permit our reference images to be used for training, fine-tuning, evaluating, or grounding machine learning models or AI systems. This is consistent with our own use of AI internally: we build models on the data and market signal we have rights to, and we expect our customers and crawlers to respect the rights of the artists, photographers, and estates whose work the reference layer depicts.

If you are an artist, an artist's estate, a photographer, an assignee, or a representative of any of these, and you would like to:

• Request a correction to attribution, copyright notice, or rights-holder identification on a specific work,
• Request removal of a specific image,
• Discuss licensing of one or more works for use in LiveArt's reference layer, or
• Submit information to help us identify a currently unknown rights holder for a work,

submit a request through our contact form. We aim to respond within five business days. Where a request is straightforward — a corrected attribution, a takedown of a specific image — we will act on it directly.

Separately, if you are an auction house, gallery, or estate that would like to contribute upcoming sales, results, or catalogue images to LiveArt's coverage, you can become a data partner. There is no cost to join.

Rights inquiries: Contact the rights team
General: Contact us

LiveArt is operated by Live Art AI, Inc., 700 Rockland Road, Rockland, DE 19732, USA.