Battling Visual Plagiarism
As a graphic design educator or practitioner, battling against visual plagiarism can be frustrating and daunting.I typically begin each semester with the mantra, “Art is work.” This is reinforced by showing students Ira Glass,’ “The Gap,” where he talks about the creative process and the importance of continuing to make work. I follow this up by showing Kirby Ferguson’s, “Everything is a Remix.” This usually leads to a lively discussion about visual plagiarism, appropriation, fair use, and copyright.Visual plagiarism is a complex issue at best. Most design educators require students to do visual research, just like most designers do. If a students doesn’t do research, they often say it is because they didn't want to be influenced by someone else’s work. In my experience, this is a euphemism for not wanting to put the time and energy into doing the research. We spend our time reinforcing the value of research and how important it is in the design process.After stressing the importance of looking at other people’s work, it’s necessary to follow this up with a discussion about visual plagiarism. My battle against it typically begins by reading our college’s plagiarism policy as stated in the course syllabus:Plagiarism, i.e.: the use of words or ideas of others, whether borrowed, purchased or otherwise obtained, without crediting the source…I next discuss in detail how this relates to visual plagiarism and show examples. I explain that penalties may include failure and further action if the incident is reported to the Dean of Students. I discuss reverse image finding sites like tineye.com and let them know that I will be checking their work here and they should be pro-active and take a look at their own work here to prevent inadvertently taking someone else’s work.Despite these efforts, every semester work is submitted where the “remix” looks more like a “rip-off.” This happened a few months ago when the offending student didn’t bother to look past the screen of the student sitting right next to him and proceeded to present a design that looked very familiar to his classmate. Of course, it presents an excellent teachable moment. In this case, I waited to see if the students themselves would bring it up, which I was happy to see that they did. It’s important to note, that I honestly don't think the student even realized that he was doing anything wrong. We assume when we say that visual plagiarism will not be tolerated, students know what that means.Earlier this week I participated in a workshop about collaborative learning where an English professor discussed using memes as a required assignment. Meme’s are all about the remix and the rip-off. Memes have become a ubiquitous part of our culture. When students grow up in an environment where memes are part of our dialogue, visual plagiarism becomes more complex.It happens all the time and our tools make it easy. The ability to outline fonts, image trace raster images and then make slight alterations to the vector art makes it simple. A few high profile cases include John Williams and his company Logo Garden and Modern Dog’s fight against Disney. William’s position was that he was within his rights to create many of the logos offered on the site because the logos were new vector drawing with slight alterations. In Modern Dog’s case, Disney claimed that the drawings were technical and not creative, so the issue of copyright infringement did not apply.Don’t even get me started on appropriation…In Mark Johnson’s book, Moral Imagination, he discusses how important our imagination is in our ethical deliberation. This makes sense to me and I try to incorporate it into my lectures on visual plagiarism by using the “walk in another man’s shoes” proverb. As much as we would like to believe we are wired to be good and have impeccable ethics, most of us aren’t born that way, but rather develop into ethical people with imagination playing a key role.I’m looking for ideas; as designers and design educators, what works best for you in making sure you, and those you employ or instruct, avoid visual plagiarism?
Dog eat dog world?
Robynne Raye and her partner at Modern Dog, Michael Strassburger, have been involved in a copyright infringement lawsuit with Disney, Target, and the Jaya Apparel group for the past several years. Modern Dog filed a lawsuit against the companies when the artwork from the end papers of their 2008 Compendium showed up on T-shirts being sold by Target. Anyone that I've talked to about the case agrees that Modern Dog should win based on the evidence—as long as they can stay the course and raise enough money to stand up to the stonewalling tactics of the big dogs. The recent shenanigans by the defense makes me wonder about the dog eat dog world we live in.In a Print Magazine blog post from last week about the case, Steven Heller quotes an email from Raye and Strassburger, “After misleading us into thinking they were going to settle our case without mediation, the defense filed a surprise motion on May 14th to have our case thrown out. They no longer deny (or admit) that they copied our illustrations, instead the defense is claiming that your illustrations are not entitled to a broad copyright since the dog illustrations lack “expression” and fall into the “natural world” category.”Raye has posted some of the other comments made in court on her Facebook page. Here are a few highlights:
"Favorite quote from yesterday's Motion for Summary Judgment (said be the defense attorney): 'There's very little creativity going on here'."
"I just think this case has to be one of the most absurd in the history of copyright. They deny copying our dogs for months, then out of nowhere claim that our dogs are realistic depictions from the "natural world" so therefore not protected by a broad copyright anyway."
The image below shows the illustrations of dogs in question. The dogs on green background are Modern Dog's. The dogs in center on white are from the Target T-shirt. I've circled a few strikingly similar ones. You'll find more if you look closely.
The defense is trying to claim that the dog illustrations are technical rather than creative—anyone could have done them. Raye and Strassburger dispute this claim. In fact, Raye and Strassburger think the designer used a Wacom tablet to trace the illustrations. A PhD in mathematics from Stanford was among the expert witnesses called. The witness stated that there is less than a 1 in over 2,000,0000 chance that they did not trace the dogs their book.After much time and huge expense, the trial is scheduled for September 2013. I will continue to watch this case with great interest—as well as amazement at how low people can go. I will offer as much support for Modern Dog as I can. I hope you do too.Sources:http://www.printmag.com/imprint/weekend-heller-3/https://www.facebook.com/robynne.raye?fref=ts&ref=br_tfhttp://imprint.printmag.com/buzz-poole/modern-dog-copyright-and-the-burden-of-proof/http://minesf.com/resources/cca/2012/09/10/friends-of-modern-dog/http://99designs.com/designer-blog/2013/04/19/5-famous-copyright-infringement-cases