Some of us has been there before. You see the work on the screen and you swear you’ve seen it before.
You did. Only it was in the pages of your portfolio.
When someone copies your work, it’s a crime against the spirit of sharing that is prevalent online. I got my first taste of plagiarism when I found out that my designs were ripped off from a collegemate and boy, was I in a fit. Short of busting his chops and pulling him by the collar, being there in person made it easier to let him know exactly how I felt. Happily for everyone (especially the offender) he made the right choice of re-doing his project, and still remained in one piece – and I did not press the matter further with my lecturers.
But what about in cyberspace where we can’t threaten others physically? Or when there isn’t someone to play referee? How do you go about stopping the person from benefiting from your hard work?
And so, the topic for this the *7th issue of the Good to Know project* is:
What are your thoughts on plagiarism?
Have you ever been a victim?
What did you do when someone copied your work?
I’ve sent this invitation to mailing list subscribers, but I thought readers might want to weigh in on this topic as well, as it’s one of the biggest pet peeve anyone could have. Email me at amy{AT}pikaland.com your thoughts and experiences by 30th November and if you’d like to submit an illustration to go with it, we most certainly welcome it as well!
I’m coming across plagiarism more often lately. I don’t know if this is because I’m now more familiar with individual styles, because I visit more blogs or because I’m more aware of it. I know it’s happened to Lauren Nassef, Lizzy Stewart, Gemma Correll, Julia Pott… Julia Rothman had a good post about it.
Very interesting topic. There’s so many facets. I saw someone recently complaining that another was copying her idea, but the idea was a certain subject matter to paint on. It seemed to me like 2 separate people could have thought of this, but who knows? Embroidery hoops…love them. Some (one) person must have thought..hey, I’ll put my textile artwork “on display” in an embroidery hoop—so clever. Does that mean everyone else who is doing it is “ripping them off?” By no means am I condoning plagiarism, I just think in this crafty community, a clever idea could have more than 1 creator, no? That being said, I have definitely come across artwork and thought…oh that looks like so-and-so’s work..um, that looks a little too much like so-and-so’s work. A “little” is debatable a “lot” is sad. I have a very talented friend who refuses to have an online presence because she’s so afraid of being copied, but she could be missing out on so much. It’s a risk.
I haven’t had it happen, yet. Maybe it has and I haven’t seen it yet.
I just want to add that I love embroidery hoops and I don’t think people who use them are ripping anyone off. Phew.
We wanted to share the following email we sent Amy with the rest of the readers to see what their thoughts are about what happened to us. Apologies for the length>>>
Hiya Amy,
Nice to meet you, we’re Katherine and Johnny 🙂 We’ve just read your post about plagiarism and wanted to drop you a line (well, okay several :)). It’s a very interesting topic and has really spurred us on to read more about cases of plagiarism and blatant copyright theft (like the Lauren Nassef case: http://www.laurennassef.com/sad-story/ ). It’s good timing that you’ve written this blog post actually as we recently came across someone that we knew stealing other artist’s work in order to promote her own.
We run a small creative community called Kooji Creative – it’s our way of bringing together creative friends from all over the world and a good excuse to reach out and meet some new ones too. We decided to contact an old art college friend after finding her on facebook. This girl has a group on facebook with a “gallery” showcasing lots of artwork. At first glance we were really impressed and left comments on the group page to say just that – along with other people we thought these pieces of art were her own, as it states on the page that all artwork is original, signed and dated and available to buy.
We added a profile to our site for her which includes links to her “portfolio” and examples of her work. We did this all in good faith because we believed that we were promoting the artwork of a creative and hard-working friend. It was at this point that we noticed something odd. We were browsing through her gallery on facebook and spotted a website address at the bottom of an oil painting – strange… she’d said that she only had a portfolio of artwork on facebook and myspace. The address was of an artist from the USA, a hugely talented guy who had a whole portfolio full of these beautiful oil paintings. We started to notice that other images of “her artwork” had been sourced from other artist’s portfolio sites, deviantART and google image searches after tracking them down and comparing the images. They were identical! We could even make out signatures.
We were horrified. We removed her profile on our site, contacted all the artists by email and told them about what she’d done. The oil painting disappeared from the facebook group and as far as we know one artist is still in the process of reporting this theft of his intellectual property to facebook.
It’s frightening to realise that there are people out there doing this, that those people are twisted enough to think that they can get away with this and that they are willing to lie to their friends about it too. Also it makes you question the sincerity of the people you meet “is this artwork really theirs?” It makes you afraid of sharing your own artwork because you risk this happening to you too. Most of all though it’s made us very sad because we knew this girl, saw her drawing at art college and thought she was creative, and have realised that she wasn’t the nice girl we thought we knew.
We’ve been planning on blogging about copyright theft and what you can do to prevent it online – it’s a very close topic to plagiarism, but ultimately much more serious (or is it? They’re both theft) as this person was using these artist’s work and telling people it was her own. We’ve had people copying our ideas, our designs (and it’s difficult to prove because we’re all exposed to the same stimulus, we’re all inspired by the world around us and as artist’s most of us need reference images/ photos from which to draw – I drew an elephant a few months ago – you don’t get them around here in Yorkshire so I found a photo and drew from that, am I stealing the image or simply drawing my interpretation/ my own version of it?). It’s one thing to inspire another artist it’s another to have your artwork stolen – it’s outright theft and it’s unacceptable.
Anyway, thank you so much for writing this blog post – it’s helped us to think about a very difficult topic.
Best wishes,
Katherine & Johnny
It’s happened to me more times than I can count.
Folks fall in love w/my work then decide it’s so easy that they can do it. Voila! Suddenly, it’s not only copied, but they’ve Frankensteined my cats into ‘their own rendition’ AND steal my trademark name: CalligraphyCats, CalligraphyDogs, CalligraphyPets.
Google Alerts is a great help, so are my fans. I’ve had to contact the folks at ETSY, ZAZZLE, & CAFE PRESS to enforce the cease and desist notices. Many claim a similar story to mine and feign innocent when it comes time to face the music.
At this point, it’s not just a matter of infringement and theft, but also trade dress. Additionally, I know that it’s not a matter of ‘if’ someone steals my work, but ‘when.’ Thus, I’ve addressed this issue with watermarks that include my URL in the event it is stolen. It isn’t 100% but at least they have to take the time to think about what they’re doing as they reoptimize the image in their application.
I wish I could collect donations for the time that I spend tracking down the bottomfeeders instead of doing what I love best.
@ecstewart
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