It’s OK to Copy, Right?
When I was in about fourth grade I loved to draw Ferraris and Lamborghinis that I found in car magazines and calendars. I had an arsenal of rulers, compasses, pencil sharpeners, erasers, and most importantly, several mechanical pencils. I would take apart and reassemble my drawing tools with the pride and precision reminiscent of that scene in the movies where the hero puts his gun together before a battle. I desperately wanted to create something as beautiful as those cars. As I drew more and more, my drawings began to look more and more like the photos I was drawing from. I developed shortcuts to measure and rescale the proportions from photo to drawing. I was proud of these drawings despite the fact that they were taken so blatantly from other people’s photographs. Click here to see a comparison of my drawing to the original.
As an adult looking back at that little boy I have a new perspective. I am filled with fear and concern because of the current climate of corporate greed where companies sue their customers. I think I am reasonably safe from a lawsuit by posting my plagiarized fourth grade drawing, but that’s not the point. The point isn’t about stealing music, either. I gave up Kazaa a long time ago. The nostalgia of my memories contrasts with the current environment that is very toxic to creativity. If I hadn’t drawn those cars for fear of being sued, or worse yet if I had been sued, I might not be a graphic designer today.
Fortunately I believe that the recent court ruling against file-sharing is a small loss in a much bigger war. The old regime of greed and lawyers will be defeated by the emerging open-source community. The battle will be won by and fought for young artists with deep arsenals of mechanical pencils and lead smeared wrists.
July 1st, 2005 at 3:47 pm
I just wonder how big a courtroom and how many trials it would take to bring the generation of enamored plagiarists that have filled classrooms from grade school through high school with kids franticly doodling and tracing their fondest desires onto notebooks and folders…I think we’re all safe in the knowledge that precious few of those fourth-grade drawings have ever been passed off as the original blueprints or trade drawings for the 2006 Hanft Fastback.
The letter of the law may be enough to prosecute all us little whipper-snappers with our 1.5 mm mechanical pencils, but I suspect the courts are going to leave most of us alone as they chase down all the teenagers swapping indie MP3s and bootleg movies…
Glad to see, however, that you were also pretty enamored with the mid-80′s Ferraris and Lambourghinis, my friend…I also went through an Italian auto fetish in grade school and still find those gull-wing doors fascinating. Guess that just dates me as one of those fading 90′s designers, though…
July 1st, 2005 at 4:26 pm
Paul, glad to know I am not alone. Out of curiosity, I hopped on the Lamborghini website before I made my post. I got that old schoolboy adrenaline rush. It was great.
July 1st, 2005 at 5:47 pm
I would think the lawyers are only going to target those that are affecting the corporate coffers. Drawing a Lamborghini (love it!) over and over again as a teenager is hardly causing injury to the Italian car industry. Copying MP3′s that are for sale and offering them up to millions of your least-closest friends is theft. There’s a pretty clear distinction in my mind. Having the means to do something doesn’t make it legal or right.
July 1st, 2005 at 10:38 pm
If anyone liked my post (or even if you thought it was lame) I really recommend the July issue of wired. It features a section called “Remix Planet: The Rise of Cut and Paste Culture.” It explains what I meant when I said my point isn’t about stealing music. William Gibson (author of Pattern Recognition – link to BA book review) contributes an article where he says, “Our culture no longer bothers with words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today’s audience isn’t listening at all – it’s participating.” (Sidenote: That is a dead ringer for Andrew Zolli’s theme of the closing session of last month’s HOW Conference) It’s participating without permission. Nobody has to ask permission to make a drawing from a photograph, and hopefully everybody recognized my sarcasm when I suggest that I could have been sued. Nobody has to ask permission to make there own Star Wars movie. Nobody has to ask permission to remix a song. You don’t need permission to create a poster for your favorite band, to hack software, or to write for a blog. That is where the growth and life of our culture is emerging, and it is emerging without asking permission. It isn’t coming from corporations that think there product is a specific sequence of 0′s and 1′s that add up to a Metallica song. Customers aren’t satisfied with that product, and they aren’t going to pay for it. They want something else: to participate. And they will, even if it means fighting the very industry that sold them their music … or movie, or software, or photography, or book, or whatever. One more quote from William Gibson: "We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us – as surely and perhaps as terribly as we’ve been redefined by broadcast television."
July 15th, 2005 at 8:34 am
I recently read something that Picasso apparently said:
“Good designers borrow; great designers steal.”
Now, considering I’m not sure where I read it, it may or may not really be something he said. Regardless, how can this statement be true? Or is the truth of creativity completely contradictory to what our society is telling us about it?
Creativity, by definition, involves connecting two things/ideas/concepts/works/materials that wouldn’t normally be put together. This is assuming that those other two things have already been created¢úÁ∂†robably by someone else.
I guess it all goes back to that copyright issue.
It helps and it hurts. It frees and gives credit where credit is due, yet sometimes it stifles opportunity for others.
November 5th, 2005 at 12:24 am
I want to know how to draw cars. HELP ME!!