A lesson on copyright

Recently on Model Horse Blab there was a long discussion on copyright infringement. Here is the short version:

There was a girl ("GingerC") on DeviantArt.com who has been tracing photos of Breyers and resins, calling it "line art", and selling them as original artwork. Included was Orinocco, Let's Fly, Baby Sundae, El Cid, as well as the Stone Arabian and several Breyers. Very well known profiles, and very easily spotted. These were not drawings using these horses as reference, these were direct tracings. Beyond just having them on DeviantArt.com, she is selling these "drawings" on eBay as originals.

If you would like to read the whole thread, you can find it here:

http://www.modelhorseblab.com/forums/showthread.php?t=81790

Tracing or sketching from other artist's work is as old as art itself. Sketching from the Masters is something that is still done in art school, and it is a very valid and valued practice since there is much to learn from these great works. However, there is a huge difference between sketching the Mona Lisa for practice, and trying to sell that sketch as original work.

It is no different than trying to sell sketches of resins or Breyers. The copyright belongs to the original artist, and is their creative property. It is illegal to post these derivative images in a public place, like the internet, or to try and profit off them.

To draw a comparison, it would be like a musician re-recording a Beatles album and claiming it as their own. Or, it would be like someone re-recording a Beatles album and selling copies of it without getting the rights to do so. Both are illegal. This is why people are having their videos yanked on YouTube all the time if they contain copyrighted material.

Example: say you make a home video and set it to a "Hard Days Night". You did not get permission to use that song in your video. Although you are not making money off it, YouTube is through their ad revenue. So, they are profiting from copyrighted material. The result is that your video is pulled. Same type of situation.

That is the problem with the internet. It is too easy to steal and pirate other people's creative property, and often times the people doing it don't even know. This is more widely understood in the music market with the bringing down of Napster. You can't steal music without paying for it. Similarly, you can't steal other artist's creative property without paying for it.

By not giving credit for the creative property, and also trying to sell the tracings, GingerC committed MAJOR fraud and copyright infringement. She needs a serious smack upside the head.

The bottom line: if you are going to copy another artist's work, for practice or to better your own artwork, that is fine. But don't put it on the internet, and don't try to market it as your own.

Another music analogy to better understand:

My husband is a classic and flamenco guitarist. He wanted to put together a compilation of songs for an album. He would be playing all the songs, so they would be his interpretation of each piece . However, the songs themselves were written by other people, and so their creative property.

In order to record these songs and offer the album to the public (this means sell the album OR give it away), he had to go get written permission AND pay a fee PER song to the companies/people who owned them. The cost varied from song to song.

To bring it back to this particular Orinocco situation: even though GingerC did her "interpretation" of Orinocco, the original piece belongs to Sarah MB. In order for her to put the resulting image in a public place, like the internet, she needed express written consent from Sarah MB and to pay for its usage.

Sarah M-B said it best in this post on Blab thread:

"You can read the full code here: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/

Aside from the law providing the copyright holder the sole right to reproduce said image for public display and/or profit (106: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/1...6----000-.html), there are two more intrinsic dangers here peculiar to modern technology:

(1) People stealing another artist's original image (or unauthorized use) and placing it up on a publicly accessed website puts that image in danger, on a global scale (aside from the confusion of authorship that causes, too). This is why "public display" is specifically mentioned in the code. If you read the article I mentioned in a previous post (from Plagiarism Today), you'll read that unscrupulous people from the public sector mine dA for images to use illegally. In other words, because that pirated Orinocco image was put up there by that clod (and God knows for how long), I now have to be concerned about that unauthorized "line art" of my sculpture showing up on other products for sale from folks who may have snagged it before it was taken down -- and I won't get credit or payment for my work (and Liz won't get the same for her effort taking the photo). Copyright law is a tort law, too, meaning that everyone involved in the direct benefit of the infringement, no matter how unaware, is equally liable in a lawsuit. In contrast, as Lesli mentioned in a previous post, this "innocent" kind of copying was relatively non-threatening in the past (like little Susie does all the time at home in her scrapbook today -- hey, I'm sure we all did that in some measure ). However, the moment the option to post these "drawings" on the net became possible, for sale or not -- that changes radically. What was once a tightly isolated and containable occurrence by some innocent person now becomes a global problem because that "innocent" image is now exposed to unscrupulous people, and often without the original artist even knowing about it! Add into that the myriad ways to apply that digital image on "stuff," and the issue becomes a kaleidoscope of a mess. It's an issue of access and scale.

Now one could say that artists encounter these problems all the time when they display their work, especially in this digital age, and yes, that's true. However, we do so on our own terms and take measures to protect ourselves.

[Side note: Collectors of an artist's original work should be concerned as well because piracy endangers the exclusiveness of their collected works, and policing this kind of thing is distracting for the artist -- she has to take time away from studio work to bonk on the heads of those who would steal what comes out of it. Aggravating to say the least.]

(2) When people steal another person's creative idea, they're stealing property. When it comes to a working artist -- there are only three things she will ever have: Her time, her reputation and her materialized ideas. Copyright infringement steals all three. This is why it's wrong to put these stolen images on public display, no matter how innocently created or intended, and doubly wrong to put a new copyright notice on it, as though it was "new art" that could be under this person's copyright. It's triple-wrong to attempt to profit from such bogus images, too.


Sarah MB"