Number One: Give credit immediately to the original creator. Do you think Paula Scher could have gotten away with the Swatch Ads if she didn’t own up to stealing from Herbert Matter? Hell no. Perhaps it was always meant to be an homage or perhaps not. People are willing to let that one go because Paula will be the first one to tell you where the idea came from, and that is important. Credit in the creative arts is very important, and often the thief will be the one to win praise and fame (and possibly fortune), whereas the original creator gets squat. And nobody is going to tell you that doesn’t hurt and hurt bad. Please note that this does not work when one is stealing TVs or automobiles, only art.

This is totally cool to do.

Number Two: Do not profit. In fact, try not to let money change hands at all. As important as credit is, money is more so. And the only thing worse than not getting credit for your original idea is not getting paid for it when someone else is. So if you are doing the stealing, and want to put this thing into the world, make sure you’re doing it for free.

And that’s it, kids! Also try to make sure the original work is not owned by a major corporation, because they really don’t like that, regardless of credit and lack of profit. Intellectual property law and all that.

More than ten years ago I was the victim of something a lot like this. I had drawn a picture or a superhero of my own “creation” (inspired heavily by gritty action heroes like The Punisher) and had a t-shirt made of of it for my uncle’s birthday at the local Kinko’s. About three months later as i was walking the halls of my high school, I noticed a girl wearing the exact same shirt. I learned that she had gotten it from her boyfriend, who had purchased it at “some comic shop downtown.” I also learned that my uncle still had his original shirt, so the only logical explanation was that there were new shirts. There were some rather strongly worded, legally-based letters that followed this discovery, and yet I never found out who stole my drawing, nor how much money they made off of my work (considering the quality of the drawing, my guess is “about $10”).

Locally, there is a story which has grown to epic proportions, nigh legendary, of an art-director who so plagiarized an annual report originally created for Nike that it has been said you could hold the pages side-by-side and detect no discernible difference. And were you to speak the name of this art director ten times in front of a mirror with the lights off, he would appear and steal your soul. Likewise, I’ve also heard a story from a close friend where one of his projects was published nationally, only to receive a letter from an obscure Canadian design firm claiming idea-theft. Canada is far, far from here, and to the best of our research their original work was never published, so we could only assume two unrelated people coincidentally had original ideas similar enough to become linked after the fact. In Todd Goldman’s case, however, there is far too much similarity of detail to chalk it up to mere coincidence.

—nv—