WWYD - "You Stole My Work!"
As designers, we all work very hard every day at coming up with the best and most creative solutions for our clients. Sometimes, it takes a conscerted effort to get the juices flowing and develop original ideas. We do the research, work on the solutions for the project, and refine them down to the best of our ability to be presented to the client. What happens when a colleague, competitor, or someone else out there accuses you of copying or stealing their work?
WWYD - Situation 4
Here's the scenario. You're working on a freelance project and you go online to find images and ideas to communicate the solution for your client. You're grab some images to use for your concept board or to further study to create your message. You also get some verbiage or quotes from the Web to add to your creative process.
You find one image, in particular, that would fit perfectly for the campaign, but you're not an illustrator and don't know how you would reproduce it effectively. So, you place it in Photoshop or Illustrator and basically redraw it. You may even tweak the original image in order to make it "your own".
You present your final work to the client and he loves it. The job is a complete success and you go away from it with a smile on your face and a pat on your back. Suddenly, out of the blue, you get a phone call from an irate artist accusing you of stealing her artwork and threatens to sue.
You really don't think you've done anything wrong and try to explain that to the artist. She'll have no part of it and hangs up. Suddenly you're worried that you'll be billed, or served, in the next few days. What would you do?
The above scenario may have happened to you. You may "borrow" certain aspects of another artist's work for your own purposes, but change the details and nuances to make it fit in your campaign. What's wrong with that? Is that OK to do? Please post your comments here and share with us your ideas or real-life experiences.
It is one thing to be inspired by one thing, and another to take something and just change it a bit. You can't say "I'll never take anything from someone" because someone, somewhere, has already thought of your idea, and someone before them probably thought of it etc etc. Inspired means something in that work caught your eye and you want to use that, but you use it in your own design. It could be the effect they used to create bark on a tree, or how hair looks, or their color blending. If you just take their picture, trace it, then do some photoshopping you really did no work on the design at all.
Here is a fictional example I would like to use to better illustrate what, I think, inspired would be. Say a company called Elf Head wanted a logo. They made say....very glittery head accessories. You might start looking at images of elves to find what you're looking for. Obviously there are no REAL images of elves out in the world, and that means everything is made by someone. Now lets say you find that perfect elf with the head you want to cut off for the logo. If you just take it and turn it into a black and white contour line drawing, when it was a full color illustration, that would probably be blatent theft, and you're going to get sued once the artist notices. Now if you looked at what made you like that elf head, and put those aspects together, with other aspects you liked from other images, which I hope you keep looking for beyond the first image you liked, and also include what the client is looking for, I would say you have no problems with the artist(s).
If the graphic artist is taking any piece of the original source arts it is theft. Thomas Jefferson said "To the cow her milk", or in other words, to the originator their ownership. Being inspired by something is fine, and to use your words, "Now if you looked at what made you like that elf head . . ." to which I would add, and then went off and created your own original take on it . . ."I would say you have no problem with the artist(s) as long as you are not copying the image."
Why is this even a question?
If you obviously created a derivative work using someone else's image without their permission that is copyright infringement. It could run you a lot of money.
Go to www.copyright.gov and download Circular 14 on registering a derivative work. It explains what one is along with how to register.
Another informative website is:
http://www.artslaw.org/
hello. i agree with thomas and susan. it's ok to be inspired by an artist work, and to use it in your own design. surely copying isn't an effort at all. when i was in my final year, my friend did a good ad campaign and we all adored it. but in the next year, when it's our juniors' turn to display their final artwork, i found one student did exactly like what my friend did, the concept, colour, everything. yes, he was inspired, and the artworks look like he just continue the campaign made by my friend. luckily it's just works for exam, and let it go, though we feel bad about it. it's just not fair, he didn't really work on it. he takes and continue. and i always tell myself, never steal anything from other artist. if i did, then i shouldn't be called a designer at all.
Think twice before tracing an image. In 1994 Corel held a competition for people to submit artwork created in Corel Draw. The winning entry was a tracing from a Tony Stone photograph.
Tony Stone sued the artist for 400,000 dollars.
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I agree with steve. By copying the design concept of another is a crime. You may take ideas from others design and can make your own design.