Here's my question: If I used the stock images in Photoshop or stock images from Public Domain and manipulated them enough that they looked completely different, and barely recognizable as the original product/image and I put this in a say, webcomic, and that webcomic gains profit, does it or does it not violate copyright/authenticity/fair use?

On the subject of this, if I pulled several copyrighted songs together and remixed them together enough into my own song that they can't be recognized as individual songs, nor can they be recognized as the original songs at all. I ask the same question as above.

Fair use implies you aren't profiting off of whatever you're using it for, so no none of these fall under that.

I don't know about your first example but your second is called sampling and yes you do need permission in most cases. Here's more info.

All right. Thanks for the answer.

Quote from Exilement

Fair use implies you aren't profiting off of whatever you're using it for, so no none of these fall under that.

This is not strictly true. Profiting from someone else's copyright work makes it much harder to argue as fair use but isn't the determining factor for what is or isn't considered fair use. For example many parody works are legally considered fair use even though they're heavily based on copyrighted material.

Copyright and Fair Use are tricky subjects that are generally easiest when they're avoided completely, but if the work you're doing demands it then you should look up the specific details of Fair Use to establish a reasonable argument for your use of copyrighted material. The simple Wikipedia entry and more detailed Wikipedia entry for Fair Use are pretty useful, and the detailed one includes a pretty handy list of misconceptions that might help more people understand in layman's terms.

Be warned though that even if you're legally within your rights, there are quite a few businesses that will do what they can to take your stuff down or profit from it if there's even a remote chance that you're using their work, especially if your stuff gets popular enough. Review channels on YouTube have this problem since YouTube's policy is to place the onus on the content creator to prove they didn't do anything illegal rather than have copyright holders prove their copyright was violated, which often results in channels losing money or videos because they have to fight bogus copyright claims.

Good points, I oversimplified my response. In the context of a webcomic I doubt it would meet the standards for fair use but at the same time I have no idea what the copyrighted work would consist of and manipulating it to the point of unrecognizability might make the whole issue moot either way.