Inspiration or Infringement?
Posted by Laura Hickman | Posted in Copyright , Hidden Eloise , Lauren Bishop , NiftyKnits | Posted on 14:47
Last night I stumbled across some familiar fashion illustrations for sale on Zazzle.com, I immediately recognised the 12 images as the work of Lauren Bishop an illustrator whose previous clients have included Topshop and Ikea. It seemed a bit odd that such a successful and well known artist would be adorning Zazzle products with their images and of course it turned out Lauren didn't know anything about it, the seller had simply downloaded images from her online portfolio and set up shop claiming the images as their own.
Copyright infringement has become somewhat of a hot topic lately, since Hidden Eloise discovered her design had been traced and sold on to Paperchase, examples of copied images have been popping up in the Twitter feed with alarming regularity [in fact another Paperchase case has come to light while I've been writing this post]
Hidden Eloise's design and the Paperchase products.
The designer of the Paperchase items eventually admitted to tracing the outline of Hidden Eloise's figure although she maintained she had no intention of copying the character. In Lauren's case the Zazzle seller hadn't altered the images at all, a clear cut example of theft.
NiftyKnits a finalist in Harry Hill's K Factor, recently found copies of her character 'Harry Hill Meerkat' had popped up for sale on Ebay. The seller, apparently unaware that they had done anything wrong, swiftly removed the item from their store.
These recent cases have made me ponder the differences between inspiration, a 'helping hand' with your design and blatant infringement of copyright. We are all inspired by great artists and most of us would never dream of passing off somebody else's work as our own but it seems some of us may be crossing the line without realising it.
I regularly use photographs as a reference for my work, one of my best selling paintings before I began doing personal commissions was a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Obviously never having met Marilyn myself I based the design on a photograph, being under the impression that if you alter an image by 20-30% you aren't stepping on anyones toes. Apparently this isn't the case. The fair usage policy (according to painting.about.com) is in fact just 10% of the original design, the rule of thumb being that if you place the two images side by side and can tell that one is a derivative work of the other it has crossed the copyright line.
You could argue that photos of famous icons are reproduced so often that it would be impossible to sue everyone who used the images and in these cases nobody is getting hurt; but where do you draw the line? I was recently commissioned to paint a portrait of a well known model (as a gift to her from a family member) I was thrilled to find so many great photographs of her to use as a reference, assuming that she would be happy for me to paint a portrait of her I didn't consider that my painting was a derivative and possible copyright infringement of the original photograph.
Whilst my icon paintings were never a true (or intentional) 'copy' of a photograph there is no escaping the fact the original image is still evident in the final design. The vast majority of my commissions are from personal photographs which I have permission to use but for future work where I do need a photographic reference Creative Commons images will be my new best friend!
For more information on copyright for artists and where to find reference images see http://www.painting.about.com
To purchase legitimate work from the artists mentioned in this post please visit their online stores by clicking the images below:
It's a tricky subject, isn't it? My first online knits were made from commercial patterns - I believed that because I'd bought the pattern, I was entitled to sell the knits. Fortunately more experienced sellers put me right on that misconception! Later I created my own pattern for an alien from a well-known TV show. I thought that because I'd written my own pattern, it was ok - but again I was wrong, the original alien was a copyright character and I had to withdraw them. My meerkats I consider are "fair use" as they are parodies - none of the characters I knit were meerkats until I got my hands on them. I recommend Etsy's fan art Material from the Storque: http://www.etsy.com/storque/events/fan-art-talk-in-the-virtual-labs-special-guest-professor-hen-2717/
Great link Nifty, thanks! Funny that they mentioned Marilyn paintings! It is difficult and seems to be a very murky area but it's sad that so many people show a complete dis-regard for other peoples work. It's interesting to see how many mass produced canvas prints you can buy online which are carbon copies of the original image, I'd hazard a guess that those sellers don't fall into the 'inspired fans' or 'confused about copyright' categories. I think you can safely say that your Meerkats are one of a kind! :)
It's a long learning curve, isn't it? I'm just glad we're both still learning :-)