http://faso.com/theartedge/66723/lisa-congdon-vs-cody-foster-what-about-the-photographers
The following are my comments as related to the issue above…You can read the full conversation as relating to copyright law & art at the link above…
It is a well written blog post with some very good points throughout all of the comments…
Many of the links given within that conversation refer to other major cases of copyright infringement…
A MUST READ for any artist or copyright lawyer…
Brian Sherwin the author has proven to be a solid when it comes to art writing & research…
So his take on things here is a good take based on his previous takes on other important art issues…
Also, Brian gets results…Please support his writing…(Whether or not you agree with the issue at hand)…
Beginning of my own comment stream on that Blog Post…The spaces indicate responses, which I cannot republish here…
1)Bravo Brian for having the cohones to write and research what I had just thought on first inspection of the original argument…The original work did not look original to me…I left…My opinion on that type of argument is “karma is a b-tch”…seen it before…Artists with derivative works getting copied and screaming about it…I see it as karma…(not all of these cases are karma, some really have validity, but this one no)…
2)In Canada there was a big case…Robert Bateman takes photographs himself of wildlife then traces/copies those into paintings…The artists’ board or tribunal or whatever they were called back then(I don’t remember their official name) had a tribunal about the tracing from your own photographs to paintings issue…It was decided that he could no longer call himself an “artist” that he was to call himself a “naturalist”…To our artist community here in Canada, tracing from photos to make a painting was considered a severe and serious transgression…Not all decisions are made by lawyers when it comes to art practices…
3)Andy Warhol famously stole someone else’s photograph to use in one of his silkscreens…The stolen from photographer worked out a deal with him…She got an original Andy Warhol work and royalties on any sales of the work that contained her work…This is another way to handle theft or appropriation issues…Let’s Make a Deal…
4)Bravo again Brian Sherwin…Good for you again…Thank you for being a shoulder to lean on…A balanced view means that you will give the right answer not just the biased popular vote answer…Good on YOU!
Sari Grove
I spent 6 months in winter feeding Trumpeter swans…While I was working on a concrete sculpture, I also returned to sketch in person how exactly the black bill connected to the face and where the eyes were in relation…That’s what I call research…But then that work sold for 12K after a year’s work…Had I collaged my ideas from photos I could have charged less…
Try making an ornament…It’s way harder than making a painting…if one is apples to oranges, then so is the other…So the painting is different than the photos? An ornament is different than a painting…The point is moot…
http://brandingsource.blogspot.ca/2012/11/new-logo-senterpartiet.html On Nov. 8, 2012 The Norway centrist Party released their new logo which is a 4 leaf clover with the hashmarks/leafs in the centre as a cross…This design is visually similar in shape to the “flag” design on each of the animal’s saddles…What I wonder is if the design committee used Lisa Congdon’s idea or vice versa, since her elk/moose/deer image on her website seems to be dated 2011?
http://www.stencilease.com/db/display.asp?input=2770
But then this Christmas ornament Stencil seems to be ubiquitous and closer…
I’m done…I don’t care…
There is no court case here…
The artist’s work is too dubious…The rest of the work on the site seems traced from photos…
So there is precedent…
Let he who is without sin be the first to cast a stone…
I’m gonna save my stones for something better…
Thanks Brian and everybody else…
That’s research!!!
It took me 2 years to formulate a porcelain recipe and armature design no-weld, I am also an accomplished painter…Come back to me when you have made a porcelain ornament and insult me then…It is hard…The 3d dimension means you need to perfect all views…
http://www.westelm.com/products/bottle-brush-ornament-polar-bear-d386/?pkey=cchristmas-ornamentsand
and look, West Elm has a cute selection of ornaments, including our polar bear and elk(moose, deer?)…
West Elm has also kindly removed the saddles…Such a cruel thought…
Shall Cody Foster sue West Elm now for theft?
Brian, who I keep mistyping BRAIN, found the secret…
The SHAREALIKE designation means, once again for those who
weren’t listening, is that if I SHARE this with you, and you decide to
put a ribbon around its neck, which you think is pretty, that you
CANNOT sell your new updated version of my work with a ribbon
around its neck…YOU MUST ALSO SHARE IT ALIKE…
*hence the ShareAlike designation that brain mentioned earlier…
Which means that the Cody Foster geniuses, despite not seeing
the sharealike designation (on our crying wolf tantrum subject
of
this discussion’s website or blog), had the depth of spirit to
sense the truth, or perhaps knew that our tantrum-ming subject
had used someone else’s work that had the sharealike
designation originally, because, I am guessing, Cody Foster is
pretty good at knowing both art and artists…
West Elm snobbing out on Cody Foster is interesting, since at
their low low prices, they must be riffing off of others, since
originality usually is expensive…
Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War…
Blanche, There are exceptions across the board in just about every country on this planet for schools and that includes professors…Later this causes confusion when students and professors enter the real world and continue using the same practice they used in schools…But legally, it is different when you put a price on something…It leaves the umbrella protection of the school and enters the bigger world where you may get rained on but you have more water…Copyright exemptions-you can look it up for schools wherever you are to get the precise rules for your locale…(It is also why art professors in universities are not necessarily known in the real world as artists)…
Humour aside…Kelly…Those exact issues drive me crazy…In particular with animal pictures, paintings and sculptures…That animals get used repeatedly with no payment, permission nor waiver…There are animal rights lawyers around finally today…Most artists know that all models do need to be paid, albeit with a donation to a wolf wildlife preserve or some free food for the winter or an artificial nest carefully built…Architecture as well…Yes…Someone was the architect builder craftsman/woman of that cabin…Who was it? Most of the time I just want to know because I am curious…But snapping digital photos of people’s stuff and using them in your own stuff without any mention is sloppy and careless…Humour aside…
Zoom, letzte Nacht Ich schickte eine E-Mail an Cody Foster bietet alles, was sie gerne von meiner Website zur freien Verwendung … Ich legte ein Foto von meinem Trompetersschwan Skulptur als Beispiel mit der Nachricht, dass ich mit Miniaturen es würde mich freuen und werden tut mir so leid, dass jemand in unserer Gemeinde hat ihr Unternehmen weh … dass ich ihnen meine Unterstützung … Sari
First of all the cases you cite, Dan B, have had new precedent more recently in art history…The case of the photograph of the Rastafarian which was stolen and an electric guitar out into his hands in the photograph to make him look not like a religious person but a rock star was won by the original photographer…
Secondly, once again, because it has been said here earlier not by me, a sculpture is not a painting…In the case of the sculptures, the 3 dimensional aspect is pivotal…The design print on their backs is secondary…
Lastly which has not been mentioned yet, I have no idea how much loss of money we are talking about in this discussion…My feeling is, not much…Not enough for 247K Facebook hits slandering Cody Foster…Not enough for the possible loss of a retailer contract by West Elm to Cody Foster…The damage caused by this attack has caused more loss of income to the attacked than the plaintiff…Which says to me a countersuit is not stupid…If it has to go the way of lawyers…
The enemy of my enemy is my friend…
In Canada copyright is assumed…What that means is, is assume that the work is copyright protected unless otherwise indicated…That means there is no need for the small c in the circle symbol nor a notice nor any sort of warnings etc. …It is not there for the taking unless there is some sort of indication otherwise…
This is different depending on country…
Also in Canada…Changing a work of art, once it has left the hands of the artist is frowned upon…The act of changing the meaning of an original work from one thing to another…There was a famous court case…
Michael Snow sold a flock of Canada geese carved from wood to the Eaton family…They were designed to be hung from the very very high glass atrium ceiling and suspended for the thousands who go through that beautiful mall daily…They are there to this day…
One Christmas someone got the bright idea to tie red ribbons around the necks of the geese…For Christmas…
When the artist heard about it, he sued…They were not allowed to change the work…Even though the work had changed hands, the artist still had ethical rights about what was done to the work…
It was argued that the dye on the red ribbons could come off on the wood…Also that the red ribbons cheapened the hand carved work turning it into a shop display…He was right and he won the case…The red ribbons were removed…
The original artist has a say about the transformation of his or her own original work…
Does the original photographer feel that it is ok to transform the Polar Bear photograph into a cute Christmasy type thing where the polar bear is now a beast of burden?
A wild thing has been made a painted donkey?
One might want to ask the original photographer how he or she feels about the transformation…
Is it degrading or uplifting? Blasphemy or Blessing?
Obviously the person who traced from that photo, and who is using common folk icons, is not pleased with the ornamental sculptures…
Or is it that the creators of the ornamental sculptures didn’t offer her money for her tracings…?
I am guessing the screaming and yelling is about getting more money because settlement deals were mentioned…
In regards to volumes of words, it is this accuser who is bunking up our time with harassment and verbiage…
I’m guessing if someone throws some money at her, she will shut up…
Perhaps if the work was more original, these type of scare tactics to eke out a living wouldn’t be necessary because a decent living from more honest work might have been had…
God owns the Copyright on Nature…
Das tut Mir leid…
| 10/22/2013 12:10:13 PM | |
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One of my first attempts at bronze sculpture was stolen from a show…
It was an abstract memory of a real dried blowfish that my brother used to keep on his desk… Of course, I reported it to he police and whatnot, but nobody knew where it had gone… A few years later, I was reading the curriculum vitae including visuals of a youngish architect, it was a news story… One of his proposed developments was called something like Starfish developments… When I looked at the architect’s rendering, I realized he had based his concept for a living dwelling for humans on my bronze… But he had blown the whole thing up scalewise, and his idea was that people would live inside the prongs of the star… I remembered there had been an architect’s office above the gallery… So I got in a huff for about a minute…Tweeted something angry with a mention and a link to the architect’s work… The development was proposed for somewhere in China, a waterside property… It had not been chosen yet to be built… Though the same architect’s(he was part of a a team) Marilyn Monroe style building had been built here in Toronto… (Poor Marilyn…Still getting exploited even post-mortem)… Anyways, I stopped, I thought about it… I had to be honest, the concept was brilliant…I liked it… I liked what the architect had done with my idea… So I settled down and decided that it was an honour that he liked my work… I forgave the theft also, because to be honest, since it was my own work, I could make another one… Years later, when I developed my no-weld armature style, I did repeat the same idea, just using different materials… Bronze was too expensive… Anyways here’s my point… As an artist, just because someone uses your work for an idea of their own, doesn’t mean you have to sue them for money or anything else… If you like what the have done with it, and maybe it is for the greater good, maybe you can see it that way… I was also humble, because, though my sculpture was incredibly different from the original blowfish, I still had used that idea in my brain to create the thing that looked like a many-pronged starfish, or star… Why would this graphic designer(I am referring to the person who is lawyered up and crying wolf as a graphic designer because her practice is more common there than in fine art), why would she scream so loud about this? Where is the humility? Is the work bad that the company did? Even if the company used her work, is the product bad? THAT anyone has stolen or taken or copied is not the only question… What was the reason, the result, the motivation? Did a homeless person steal your sandwich? Yes… Are you ok with that? yes… There are times to sue and times to shut up… If you are stealing yourself you should consider shutting up… At the very least, for the reason my father used to say, which was: “DON’T GET CAUGHT”… My blog post here is intended to grab you into reading Brian Sherwin’s original post with all the comments & links attached in the comments…It is educational…
My intent is not to blow my own horn here…My horn has been blown enough recently…But thanks for asking, Sari Grove
More:
Thank you Katherine Tyrrell, those links are invaluable as well as your most informative comments and of course peripheral blog posts and tweets that you have persisted in posting tirelessly for many years…In regards to someone’s early comment about percentage…I remember when we all had to use photocopy machines in reference libraries if one wanted to take some material from a book home…I checked with a librarian…I was allowed to photocopy 10 percent of the book…A 400 page book, I might be allowed 40 pages…(not that I did)…Though there are no percentage guidelines given in visual art(I bet Katherine will come up with a link!),
I have held the 10 percent idea for myself… It was the best that I could do… So, for me, up to a maximum of 10 percent of an image might be less of a risk… You could still get sued…But it might be helpful… Not the whole fox, maybe just the earlobes… Something like that… Yeah Leslie I read that already…I’m talking about if you are going to steal…
Aw Leslie, this is a sting…”The law is an ass”…Charles DickensRead Bill Harrison’s posts to understand…Sometimes a law is wrong, so artists have to break it to make it right…Technically they are illegal, but in God’s eyes, they are in the right…
See Jesus for that concept… I’m sorry if people aren’t getting that point…Please let me back away from this conversation without any more insults or questions… I really need to get some fresh air… Thanks…You all have been most helpful, including the artist in question who was willing to perpetrate the sting… Also the writers and companies in question, good sting… Sari teaching, defending, and the word “crap”…First, I’d like to say thank you to Bill Harrison…For his wonderful expert opinion and tremendous experience in the industry…Not to mention the great new humorous expressions!Secondly I’d like to explain the word sting…(I mentioned earlier)…Lisa Congdon was a teacher…For a long time…You will find in your path that teachers might set you up in order for you to learn a lesson…This is a type of sting, but a good sting…I sense the didactic(teaching) aspect of her actions…The act of doing something controversial has grabbed attention and now we are all learning as a result…
It has the mark of a teacher…A sting… Bill, in reference to this sting, if it be that, what we are seeing is a deliberate breaking of the law (including your very well said “paying a worker his just dues” Bible quote), a deliberate breaking of Gov’t law and Bible law in order to teach a point… Perhaps there is nothing wrong with copyright law, but apparently not many know that because they haven’t read it, or there are so many different versions it has become a Babel… Ok, Thirdly…Defending…The reason this article may be biased is because we are now defending someone who has been wronged…This is part two of a fight where the fight has been one sided for too long…We are answering back in order to balance out this argument… Ideally both parties will admit they are wrong, laugh about it, have a beer, and make amends to each other and any other party they have wronged… and not do it again… Which is why this blog post and many of the comments are leaning in one direction… For those who just stepped, you need to go backwards and see the damage that has been done to the other side… Ok? Ok… Last and Fourth? In regards to the difficulty of the 3rd dimension I am not merely speaking to visual aspects but if anyone is a Mason, and has tried to formulate their own concrete, marble or porcelain recipe, it is quite complex… I am not speaking about buying powdered porcelain powder at a store…and adding water… I am talking about knowing how to make this stuff from scratch… The reason I say this is because the word “crap” was used to describe Cody Foster’s workmanship… I find this questionable…The work does not look like “crap” to me… There is a lack of respect for sculpting and masonry in general here… It seems people are obsessed with surface… Tracing photos and collaging disparate elements from other sources into those traces may be some sort of work… I have no idea that 2d jpeg was translated into a 3d item, unless perhaps the new 3d printing technology is being used now by Cody Foster… How exactly did Cody Foster translate the 2d images into a 3d ornament/sculpture? I mean…Really…How??? (Is this a hand done paint job after the ornament was cast?) (Is it 3d printing to a mold then casting from that?) (is the material a resin? ) Sigh… Every time I try leave they suck me right back in… Realism…Photography…Illustration…
Commercial Art… Graphic Design… Established Folk Symbols that are in the public domain due to age… Knickknacks… Ornaments… “Tchatchkes” (the pejorative term for little things that clutter up people’s houses…) Mass produced cast from molds inexpensive items… People in the States complaining about Chinese people copying things, whilst the States continues to exploit the Communist pricepoint by farming their own work out to poorer people there… In regards to the person who felt like insisting to me that what Cody Foster did was infringement… Yes I know…Duh… But I looked at the work that was supposed to be the original… It wasn’t original enough for me to care… I mean, West Elm has a polar bear brush ornament selling for 8 dollars on their site… 8 dollars! I can’t make a polar bear brush ornament or Xmas decoration for a tree for 8 dollars…I just can’t… All of the people involved are working too hard for too little money… Suing each other might bring in some publicity, possibly more people will care about the work they do… If you don’t want your work copied don’t put great images out on the net where it is easier to copy… Most of the images of my work online are taking with a point and shoot camera, in ok lighting, with edges askew… I do this on purpose… When I put out professionally photographed images of my work online it gets copied spade for spade… I didn’t upgrade to a DSLR for that reason… It is the internet…International…You are going to have to expect a certain amount of copying and deal with that… It is the price you pay for all the sharing that comes your way and helps you… It is the price of doing business… I feel this suit is frivolous…But I stuck my nose in because I like Brian Sherwin’s writing and some of the early comments here were rude to him… I also deeply respect Katherine Tyrrell… Bill Harrison showing up is just a joy and unexpected bonus… So I have stuck around because the conversation is so neat… I suppose I will care more when I see the outcome of this… If it goes the wrong way, I will be disappointed…So I guess I don’t want to invest too much emotionally until that happens… I really thought the Cariou-Prince case was a done deal…I thought the original photographer had already won…I do hope he does… When these cases get drawn out sometimes the first intuition gets lost…Then the lawyers are the only ones who benefit… I am guessing in this case too, the lawyers will go home with more money than any of the “wronged” parties… That is dumb… Ok, it is morning, now…Please try to be less interesting so I can try to get some fresh air… I am hostage to the conversation right now… Sari
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You are all welcome to read my book for free online as a pdf embed on my website…
In the spirit of agreement to Lynne McTaggart & the contents of this blog post
http://www.lynnemctaggart.com/blog/242-big-pharma-and-the-mafia
, you may access my explanation of the body parts & how they work, which should greatly simplify confusion caused by Big Pharma’s constant invention of new & longer words to obfuscate code to recipes…
I should warn you all, I have taken it down to 11 organs, with their corresponding two opposing elements inside…Even salt NaCl is tucked in as an element under the Hg mercury listing…
The idea is to help people to make their own decisions…Self-efficacy…
“We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.”
— Blaise Pascal
Self-efficacy is an excellent prognosticator for surgical recovery…(excerpt from the results of a longer study relating to how Chinese women did better after surgical intervention when allowed to choose their own way…)
Sari Grove (sarigrove.com)An artist innovating in the Medical Arts... 