The art collection we've spent years gathering, digitizing and remastering was either never copyrighted or has expired copyrights. This places the artwork we've collected for you into the public domain, which means the original paintings belong to everyone. Our restored digital files are sold with a license (see our license terms). Church bulletin printers, news agencies, marketing firms and moms have valued our growing collection since 2006.
We laboriously scrutinize copyright status of every image in our collection before giving it our Guarantee that the underlying artwork is in the public domain (we even know the first names of our attorney's children). Next, a lot of well-meaning folks out there do not understand United States copyright law regarding art images, which protects creativity and not slavish (identical) copies of two-dimensional artwork in the public domain. To substantiate this claim further, a historical precedent was set with a landmark court case in 1999 to establish this very point.
The core point of the case: if a painting or picture is in the public domain, and someone creates a copy of it, that copy cannot be copyrighted. The only instance where the copy could be copyrighted is if the person were to create a substantially altered work based off the original. At that point, a new piece of derivative art is created, which can be copyrighted. We don't claim that the unique collection we've gathered for you is derivative, because we focus only on enhancing the artwork to its original beauty.
A note on terms: when we say the art is in the public domain, we mean the underlying painting carries no copyright, royalties or dues to anyone. Our own restored files are sold with a license. Every purchase includes our Standard License for personal, parish, school, ministry, and publishing use, and for purchases made on or after November 1, 2026, use on merchandise or products for sale requires a Commercial License (details). This same logic also applies when we use the word 'stock' as a modifier.