Newbie/ question on public fractals

I'm confused about the public section are these designs subject to copyright or can they be used freely?

It is generally accepted in the UF community that the artist retains the copyright to any images or parameters they share so it would be considered very bad form to take someone's parameters and pass them off as your own or use/publish the parameters/image elsewhere without explicit permission (though occasionally parameters come with a statement that they are totally free to use).

That said, the point of sharing parameters is to help others learn (which is presumably what you mean by "public" parameters). So you are free to load up shared parameters and have a poke around to see how the image was constructed and to tweak the parameters to see how things work or to make new images for your own personal and private use.

Where it is less clear cut is when you make a new image based on someone's else's creation. I think most artists are happy for you to call something your own if your image bears little or no resemblance to the original because of all the work you have put in - it is perfectly possible for tweaks to take an image in a totally different direction, sometimes a single layer can give a new user a good starting point for their own explorations, for example.

If, however, there are still many similarities between the two images then you really should credit the original artist wherever you publish an image, with a link to the original parameters or artist homepage if possible. Where the resemblance is very noticeable (e.g. same structure just a few colour changes) then you should consider contacting the artist, if possible, for their view on the result.

It's basically a question of fairness and honesty in acknowledging the work of others. Those artists who do not want people using their images or learning their arty secrets will never publish their parameters. Others are happy to share everything without restriction. Most UF artists fall somewhere in between.

Thank you for your detailed reply. Do you know or anyone know of any leads on learning how to write ones own parameters? There are some tutorials out there but they seem to be catered towards using the public files which I personally would like to steer away from.

Thanks

You may be getting the different file types confused. See https://www.ultrafractal.com/help/index.html?/help/browsers/filetypes.html for a list. Velvet--Glove's comments apply to Parameter and Fractal files (.upr and .ufr), which describe fractals. There are lots of these in the public formula directory, created by formula authors to demonstrate their formulas. The other types of files are used to create fractals and may be used freely for that purpose; that's why the authors contributed them to yhr public formula database. So it's fine to follow tutorials that use the public formulas to make your own fractals. However, if you want to make your own transformations, fractal formulas, or coloring algorithms based on the public ones, you should get permission from the author before publishing them. (No restrictions sharing images made with the such formulas, but you can't share the parameters; they won't work without the formulas.)