Image choice specificity

Question

I'm working on designing a personal website for myself (a CS student for reference), and I'd like to include a "book" on the home page.

Fahrenheit 451 is a book that really impacted me, and I also really like the cover as seen here.

As such I was thinking of drawing the "matchbook book" that you see on the cover, and including it in my webpage. My question is two part:
1) The purpose of the book is to contain an "about me" section (I'm planning to have the book open up when navigating to the section), and I'm unsure if it would be better to just have a generic book would be better. My doubt comes from though the book has a lot to do with me, the image may be too specific and leave the user confused. Is there some middle ground?
2) Would the copying of the image and subsequent use of it violate any copyright laws or anything of that sort?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Yes, according to the description you made of your use of the design, it would be easy to see some infringement there... especially if you also make reference to the book.

To give you a guideline, the court logic would be:

"Would your design look the same if you removed the elements that were copied?" and "If the copied elements were removed from the design, would the design still convey the 'same message'?"

In your case, the answer would be no, since the copied elements ARE totally what makes the design. There is infringement. Usually, when this happens, the lawyer of Ray or whoever published the book would send you a letter asking you to change your design. If you don't change your design, they might send you a more serious letter!

If your site was a tribute to the book and not to sell your own services, maybe that could pass. Most of the time, it's when you generate profits from using the design that it can get serious.

To be safe, you should create your own design from scratch. Nothing stops you from being inspired by this book cover and the style, but it would be hard to defend that you didn't copy the design if you use the same layout, the same fonts, the same kind of graphics.

The link below is an interesting case that happened not long ago and went viral. It's an example of a similar situation of a writer who used the Jack Daniels label style for his book cover.

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/jack_daniels_cease-and-desist_letter_goes_viral_for_being_exceeedingly_poli/