Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/06/french-graphic-designer-is-ups.html
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“good artists copy, great artists steal”
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When I just looked at the one…it could have been just a graphic art coincidence. But when you see the entire series side by side, yeah, there’s some copying of the concept going on there. Even down to the color choices.
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I can’t BELIEVE a movie about space piracy would pull such a scoundrel move.
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To paraphrase Jerry Holkins, I don’t think Picasso was advocating looting the Louvre.
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Greedo stole first.
Seriously though, pretty ballsy of a company notorious for the lengths it will go to defend it’s IP.
I guess it’s one law for the Mouse and another for the Mouse’s subjects.
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I have to say, on a basic note…adjusting opacity between two intersecting pieces of imagery (in this case the character image and the type face) isn’t exactly new or original stuff…as is pointed out in showing other posters (Shining, CWO, etc).
This being said…matching up the individual posters to the individual album covers really puts a specific tone and color palette that seems a bit unmistakable.
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Copyright sucks. You shouldn’t get to own an idea forever. We each owe our entire culture and history for our creativity, none of what we made was done in isolation.
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The company known for defending its IP knows it has nothing to worry about here.
Somebody’s boss said, “make them look like these.”
Yeah it’s fun to slam the big company but jeeeeez this is how design works!
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You miss my point. Disney can crush fair use by all but other major media companies because, even if their case is weak, they can make fighting a lawsuit too expensive for independent artists. How much justice can you afford?
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I guess it doesn’t even count as irony that Disney was one of the organizations that made sure copyright practically is forever.
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“and they need to prove that the designers had access to the original design work”
so, proving they had internet ought to do it… -no?
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Copyright isn’t (supposed to be) about owning an idea at all. (Even though it’s increasingly being used that way.) It’s supposed to be about the right to reproduce a work for commercial gain - i.e. to have, for a limited time, control over the work one has actually created. The notion that one has the right to control things that are similar to what one has done (but include nothing of one’s own work) is downright perverse.
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I like that idea, of limited time. A patent is what -10 years then it autoexpires? Something like that. Copyright now is like a hundred years, -after the author dies. Meaning a work can be copyrighted for almost two hundred years in an extreme case. Which is profoundly ridiculous.
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Agreed the Mouse has been relentless in defending its IP. But you’re kind of making a lot of points at once. And you added the Mouse line after I started replying.
Can we leave Greedo out of this?
This is not the theft you’re looking for.
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Once I walked into an Ikea, and saw a giant print of a frame from a video I had posted on youtube. Like way back when it was all very new. They had cleaned it up, upped the rez. But it was my frame, and technically I can prove that. Video is long since gone from the web but I still have the original footage on a DV tape. But I could never afford a lawyer, let alone years in court. So I did nothing. The law, and protecting ones rights -that’s a matter of resources and money. I don’t have a lot of that, so I have no rights.
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I don’t know… each of the design elements is a fairly obvious choice. For example:
- ‘Wanted’ poster is an obvious choice for Solo, which naturally leads to that background colour.
- Filled lettering is a common device, and favours that general type of typeface.
- The colour choice isn’t unusual - a red, a yellow, a blue and a purple - with the choice of those particular shades led by a need to complement the background.
Together… yes, they’re very, very similar. But explicably.
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I dunno, heavily influenced, yes. Copy? Prove they had your CDs or something? Web logs of your browser history for the last two years? fMRI questioning? Scopolamine? Thumbscrews?
Maybe just enjoy your 15 mins of fame? or get the EFF interested somehow… if I were him I’d make the absolute maximum amount of noise about this then ride the contacts and so on into the sunset.
This guy in France did not invent images inside type. But they are far too similar to be entirely coincidental. jmso Disney will pay him some go away money and he’ll buy a nice villa.
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I dunno - the French dudes work is so generic, I am not sure why you would rip it off directly. And if you were, you would be smart enough to alter the color palate. An image inside a large font? Textured white space to make it look old and weathered? Yeah - both are used all the time.
While perhaps it was lifted, more likely it was a happy accident.
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My point in reply to your comment about slamming big companies is that I have no problem with Disney being a big company. I’m saying the nature of intellectual property law means they can get away with things they can stop others from doing. Regardless of whether you think it was theft - and in this case I do - it’s hypocritical for Disney to hold themselves to a different standard than they demand of others.
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