Deanoth wrote:
WotC owns it all. Unless it has someone Else's company logo on it, such as a company advertisement and such. But yea WotC owns the content and that includes the art.
This is not entirely correct.
The correct answer is, "It depends upon how 'old' you mean."
In the early days of the magazines, the copyright situation was more chaotic. Many times, writers and artists retained the copyrights to their own work. This is normal in a lot of "creative" magazine publishing, where writers routinely publish novels in serial form before collecting chapters into a book.
Because of the complexity of copyright ownership, most of the "old" magazines have not been converted to PDFs, since it was not worth the trouble of tracking down all the rights-holders.
Eventually, someone got wise and changed the adventures and artwork to "works for hire" so that the company owned everything. I'm not certain if this was during the TSR or WotC era.
Either way, WotC owns everything from their era, as well as whatever they bought off TSR.
However, if you want to use particularly older artwork for something, it might be possible to track down the rights-holder directly.
FWIW,
Rez
