thanks, i guess it will stay on my screen for a while and that was the main purpose from the start

mtsnoop...here's a couple suggestions that might help...

If you were to obtain the base image for your work from a copyright free source like NASA or Hubble Images and then gave credit to them for having based your work from one of their images, you should be fine.

You could also look for a stock image that you could easily get permission to use.

surely finding the actual owner of the copyrights of the image i used, would be harder than finding a suitable "free" replacement :) pretty much everything i did with the world-layer was done with the layer effects, so it is easy to replace the shape with something else. mabe something completely different as well... however the shape of the world has a few not to underestimate benefits: tt includes rather complex parts, but also some large areas where complex textures have some space to unfold. also the shape of the world can be considered as one of the best known abstractions,  but there is basically no manifested message attached to it. without giving it too much thought i think this is rather rare for something so well known. Hm, just thinking out loud

thanks for the suggestions, i'll keep my eyes open