There’s a lot of comments pitching this as “Giant media company rips off artist”. I am not sure that’s really the correct narrative. There’s a lot details we don’t have. If Bahous designed these for Sony, there’s a chance that he doesn’t own the copyright to the album covers - Sony might. That would depend on the contract he signed and also whatever country’s copyright law is being applied. Also, it sounds like Disney hired an outside design firm to design the images. And they say they are looking in to it. That could be BS, but it has also only been a few days. Any investigation (and subsequent assessment of their liability) would take longer than a few days and they’re unlikely to want to make public statements until that is done.
The narrative here could just as easily be “Small design firm tries to impress large media company client by ripping off a different large media company”, which is a much more nuanced situation and is much harder to get outraged about.
If it was just the one, I’d buy coincidence, but there is a pretty clear pattern here. With that said, having your work copied to the point of complete dilution and irrelevance kind of seems like it comes with commercial artist territory. Unlike “art for its own sake” art, commercial art necessarily has an unglamorous side which is that regardless of how the creator feels about it, the work exists to generate money for someone. If you come up with something clever that works well, it will almost always get stolen or at least “generously inspire” someone to do something similar, and that process will happen over and over until all of the cleverness of the original work has been subverted into parody.
It happens to non-commercial art, too, though it’s less of a guaranteed thing. It sucks, but my experience working with people in the field has left me with the impression that there’s not really much anybody can do about it. You can go after one or two really blatant copycats, but there will be hundreds of them, and even if you had the time to go after them all, you’d really just end up with a big pile of legal bills.
On the flip side, copyright laws are complete nonsense. The idea that someone can own an idea forever is absurd.
I’m not convinced that Disney stole (or was even inspired by) the French guys art any more than I’m convinced that lottery winners are fed the winning numbers.
THIS IS STEALING (and of a monumentally stupid variety):
It’s 70 years after the life of the author, or for work-for-hire, 120 years or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter. Which is bad enough, given that there are authors whose great, great grandchildren now control the copyrights. The original term was 14 years - which could be renewed, once, for another 14 years.
There’s a certain appeal to being in control of one’s work throughout one’s life, but the reality is that most work doesn’t have a commercial life beyond 14 years.
It isn’t. I read another article and the person who designed the Solo posters was out of house. In fact a ton of marketing is done by freelance or 3rd party companies. It usually isn’t big corporations ripping off the little guys. Half the time it is just happenstance, and the other half it’s little guys ripping off other little guys (or big guys).
It may be too late now, but if you have a decent case (not too hard to prove, and a reasonable amount of money involved) you can frequently get a lawyer to take it on contingency, as in you and they agree to split the winnings (at some ratio), and if you lose, you don’t pay.
You might find out that if “not enough” money is involved that nobody will take the case, or that the lawyer wants more then half.
It isn’t great, but it can be better then nothing.
One correction: That Saul Bass poster for The Shining was not rejected. He did plenty of designs that were rejected, but that one was used. I bought the one sheet in 1980.
Now this is one flaming take… And I’m certainly not suggesting Disney isn’t totally in the wrong here… But the net result for the artist - now that he’s managed to publicize the affair - is almost certainly going to be positive.
They stole the idea - but it’s not like the artist can just use this same idea again. He’s already applied it and got paid for it. And now he’s getting exposure + the sincerest of flattery from one of the top creative studios. “I’m so good Disney needs to steal from me!”
I have no interest in pursuing it. But thanks for the tip, I really just wanted to draw attention to how the system works well if you can afford it, and much less so if you can’t. A system of justice isn’t really a system of justice when it costs money to use it. But like you say, in theory some lawyer might represent me for a piece of the pie. I just don’t think that the pie is especially large in this instance. Ikea is obviously a large chain and they could have been selling that print globally, still -how many prints could they possibly have sold? If the court deducts their manufacturing and distribution expenses and so on there wouldn’t be all that much money in the end. I remember, at the time, I was half angry and half stoked. Stoked knowing I had made something good enough for a big chain and angry I wouldn’t at least get a recognition for it. But that’s showbiz for you. In the years since, many big companies have paid for my work so I guess I’m all good.
The Sony “The Legacy of…” series had many more entries than these four, each with a different ‘theme’ color.
Matching the ‘pallette’ was easy enough: the artist has simply picked the four covers that most nearly match the four Star Wars posters. He had plenty of other shades to pick from.
Aside from the supposed ‘color match’, there’s very little of substance here: different typefaces, completely different treatment of ancillary elements, borders, white space, overall balance, etc.
“Letterforms used as stencil for underlying image” is such an old poster trope that it’s practically a cliché. So is “related set of things differentiated by theme colors”.
(And even if they were ‘inspired’ by this artist - so what? Isn’t that how all design works - artists being inspired by other artists? I seem to remember hearing that somewhere around here…)
