virtual {mo}ritz

A while ago there was a thread on the 3D-Pro mailing list that diverged from its original subject and took a turn towards a debate about copyright.

The debate resulted when someone discovered that part of an image was being used as a backdrop for another image without giving proper credit.

It is noteworthy that the latter work was not of commercial nature. The poster got very upset about this nevertheless. I think what upset them most was the fact that the creator of the derived work claimed copyright. The poster called that person an “artist” (they used quotes to express their disagreement with the use of that term) who had “the filthy guts to rip of another (real) artist’s hard work”.

I believe that the stance many otherwise sane people take on copyright matters these days is mostly based on indoctrination carefully administered throughout their lives by an industry whose business model basically breaks down to ‘content bouncer’. Or ‘content gatekeeper’, if you prefer a less insulting but also less fitting term — given all the ‘bullying’ lawsuits that this very industry has showered individuals with in recent years.

Below is my reply to the mail — a rant rather. Since the list is private but some friends of mine told me they thought it was interesting enough, I post a copy below.

The Rant

If I take a photo of Santiago Callatrava’s Palau De Les Arts in Valencia, edit out the conical concrete sculpture-like entrance (sometimes called the ‘Christmas tree’) in the foreground and replace it with a distinctively different one (lets say it still had a conical shape, just for giggles) and which I rendered myself.

Aka: I use my photo (of Callatrava’s architecture) as a backdrop for a composite of a 3D rendered concrete sculpture I made myself. Then I nicely color correct the whole thing to disguise the fact the image was manipulated.

Would you call me a ‘someone’ who has the “filthy guts” to “rip off” another artist’s (Callatrava’s) hard work? What about a movie that uses the Eiffel tower as a backdrop in a scene?

Where do you draw the line and why there and not elsewhere?

Where does creativity/creative freedom end and where does plagiarism start? I find this an unbelievably hard to answer question.

Particularly since I spent most of my life working in an industry that creates effects for people who tell the same story over and over and over again, with slightly changed props & actors (suggested reading “The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers” by Christopher Vogler ) and dare call the craftswomen & –men, who carry out this regurgitation of ideas into moving images, ‘artists’.

My personal theory is that the people at the top just figured that most folks work harder (possibly for less money, too) if they can believe they are ‘artists’ than if they knew (or were addressed as) ‘crafty workers’.

Where do you draw the line? ‘New’ culture is always based on existing culture. As far as the sort of culture at hand goes, our mind is a blank slate when we’re born. All we do is take inputs from our senses and remix them to the degree we deem necessary to call something we thus create ‘original’.

What that degree comes down to varies vastly from person to person and most often, if someone doesn’t ‘mix much’, as in the example at hand, they’re not necessarily ill meaning at all. They often don’t even realize this. Also, mixing “much” or “little” if often in the eye of the beholder which in turn depends on how well their eye (or ear, nose, taste buds etc.) is/are trained.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

—Pablo Picasso

More plagiarism art quotes — from both sides — here.

How loud we shout at someone is often a function of their fame. The less famous the plagiarist and the more famous the plagiarized, the louder the “Plagiarism!” shouting. And vice versa.

A famous (and not really shouted at) copycat of recent times was Lichtenstein. Almost all of his comic book panel paintings were found to be verbatim copies, mostly only with very slight change of colors (sounds familiar?), of panels from original 50′s comic books, drawn by — you guessed it –, rather not so famous comic book ‘artists’; whose names can often not even be ascertained any more.

Whole cultural epochs could only come to be defined as such because people copied and plagiarized unabashed. Think about Art Nouveau, Art Deco, any style in architecture or graphics design or music of the past. How can we even talk about a period like the 60′s or the 80′s without considering this? You always have people ‘quoting’ other people’s works as this is plain necessary to create the ‘cultural unity’ that defines an epoch. What varies is the degree of change and originality in those ‘quotes’. And the degree to which it gets noticed by trained and untrained eyes & ears.

Anyone acquainted with a bit of visual art history knows that it is full of examples of what some would probably call ‘theft’. Often by some very famous artists. The digital age makes this much more direct and hence much more obvious (and easier found too, thanks e.g. to reverse image search engines).

While in the past, in a case as the one at hand, someone would have to have copied the original work’s background by hand (possibly even from their mind), digital imaging makes this a copy and paste operation. But all that differs, if we are honest, is the process. The degree of change from original to copy is a mere function of the system that is used to copy and the stylistic choice made for the copy’s look. I.e. in the case of former times, a function of the degree to which the copying ‘artist’ was eidetic or used some contemporary aids available …

What changes, perceptually, is semantics. The very essence of the process taking place is copying.

My suggestion is to read some, or better all, of Lawrence Lessig’s books on culture & copyright. And do some research on plagiarism in art. It really helps putting things into perspective. Culture, like science, can only go forward if we take what others did before us and go from there (I won’t quote Newton explicitly).

Really, who cares if he used the background & composition of another painting? You can blame him for not quoting his sources? Did Lichtenstein? Did Shepard Fairey, who tone mapped a Mannie Garcia photo and swapped the background, ‘steal’ or did he ‘create’ the famous Obama ‘Hope’ poster thereby (strange symmetry with the example at hand: here the foreground was swapped and the background copied and color corrected)?

There is a whole new rapid re-mixing culture just being created in the times we live in. Made possible by the very fact that digital media allows copy and paste with almost zero cost. After all, the Internet is the biggest copy machine humankind has ever built. We better make the best use of it and learn to get along with the fact that anything we put into this machine will be spit out again, potentially endlessly, varied sometimes oh-so-slightly, sometimes considerably, and everything in-between. For the better, mostly, sometimes for the worse. But for sure, in any case.

The example at hand does not really stand for excellence in creativity (art), but is it shows good craft (technique). I for once think the fighter plane looks well lit and the color scheme is nicely matched (and ignoring that the resolution of the background doesn’t suffice, in the full res image).

What I’m trying to say is: it is really hard to draw the line. That is why some people propose to not draw a line at all — if some criteria are met. One is that there is no fiscal damage done to/no definite potential gains taken from the “original creator” of a piece, by any derivative work. Some people, who second this point of view, put their work under creative commons non-commercial licenses. For the record: I agree with them.

I think that how ‘art’ is created is misunderstood by a lot of people. They believe it somehow comes together ex nihilo in the ‘artists’ mind. As may people have pointed out in centuries passed, many people have believed to be the case without saying so, and as science knows with certainty today, this is indeed not the case. Our brain, too, to a large degree, is just a very fancy copy machine for information.

One last thing: how do students (often) learn? By copying masters trying to understand how ‘they did it’. Consider that all the guy did was copy a master. Does he need to give credit?

If I sit down in the Louvre and paint a copy of the Mona Lisa (lets say I swap her face with one of my choosing). I put that image on my website. Do I put a credit for Leonardo in the footer of my work? Am I required to — ethically? Should I be required to? What difference does it make?