I was recently at an art competition award show in which one of the winning pieces was a stolen image. One of the illustrations, was taken from copyrighted video game concept art owned by a large entertainment company and a couple of Photoshop filters were applied to it. A guy I knew recognized it and blew the whistle after the show. It wasn't a small competition either. All I could think was "how stupid do you have to be to think you could get away with this?" I also probably said it out loud a dozen times or so.
A digital artist I follow had a similar run in when a high school girl entered one of her pictures in a contest to win a $10,000 scholarship. She was caught and fans of the artist brought it to light. The artist herself though was nice about it and after all was said and done asked people not to blacklist her, since she ended up being removed from the competition and the award was given to someone else. Here's her journal entry about it.
Furthermore as a popular artist her work is all over the internet, and sometimes people will actually accuse her of stealing her own work. The silly things people do.
That kind of thing really bothers me. I don't mind when someone wants to paint fanart of a copyrighted character or a famous person and sell it because the artist isn't taking claim for creating the idea, they are just making something based on it. They are producing a whole new thing. So long as they don't try to claim they came up with the material I see no real harm in selling fanart in small quantities. I mean all those airbrush-shirt people can do it, and I don't see how Warner Brothers is going to lose out just because some dude sells a cheap t-shirt with some lobotomized versions of Loony Tunes painted on. But I digress.
As a digital painter I spend countless hours drawing and painting, and can't stand to see someone take someone else's work and run some bs filters on it, or collage it into some crap that barely qualifies as a collage and fit's more in line with "I put hats and mustaches on it and think it's cute." What's worse is when you give no credit to the artists you take it from. Worse still is when you claim you made it and enter it in a competition. Being a digital artist I hear about computer based work get stolen a lot. Because of the nature of digital work it's hard to tell when it's stolen because google ganking a picture and printing something out takes little effort and is impossible to spot a counterfeit unless you already know the source. Because y'know it's not an oil painting or something which would have to be painstakingly copied to pass inspection.
I suppose the advantage the internet affords of getting alot of exposure for your work also means higher risk of art theft, be people really should knock it off. Or rather stop making knock offs. Something like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment