"Engineers Card" - Credit Card

© All Rights Reserved

Capital One® credit card claims you can upload your own image for use on their credit card, as long as it complies with their standards requirements. I created this Engineers Card using Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which is in the public domain and in widespread use worldwide, as well. Yet they denied approval of my image, for the reason:

“Material that could infringe on the copyright or trademark rights of another party, including branded products, marks, or business names

If you believe that you have been declined in error, please call us”

I called them, and I won’t go into the details of the long, circular conversation I had with their representative, who kept mentioning copyright, and finally said that I needed the artist’s permission to use the image. I had already stated the artist was da Vinci, the year the image was created, and that it was in the public domain and therefore not a copyright violation. I asked her how was I supposed to get the permission of an artist who had been dead for more than 70 years, and that by copyright law, I didn’t need to.