The 70 years after death is way to much, but I know a lot of illustrators, most of them never had a huge success and don’t see much money after few years but some still get steady income from books they made at the beginning of their career.
As freelancers with low income and poor retirement plans those royalties are welcome, and their children certainly won’t inherit much.
In my opinion copyright should at last least the life of the creator.
As for plagiarism and art stealing : most of the time an official looking letter is enough to get money from the company and if your are an illustrator or a visual artist you can ask the help of The AOI they are quite good at this little game.
AN other advice : take contact with a specialist BEFORE exposing publicly the plagiarist. You can be accused of defamation.
Perhaps I misinterpreted that – the point I was trying to make is that matching the “tone and color pallette” of the Star Wars posters means nothing, really , since they could cherry-pick the nearest possible matches from a wide selection of “Legacy of…” covers, each with its own colors.
If that’s what you also meant, I apologize for misunderstanding.
Well. Matching the color palettes up along with the stylized photo/typeface opacity bleed and the relative layout as well…it definitely has a specific style to it.
There comes a line to be crossed in design where you move from inspiration or similar influences to put right copying someone else’s work. I think this gets close to that line. I doubt close enough to have a legal case.
What National Review basically did is use the composition and anatomy for their own purposes. It’s not a strict copy, but it lifts a lot of the technical work from the preceding piece.
There’s not much “original” about the French guy’s stuff, either. It’s readily recognizable as very strongly influenced by 1970s “men’s adventure” novel series like Mack Bolan: The Executioner and The Destroyer.
Life of the artist is pretty reasonable. It’s not going to help most creators (because of the limited commercial life of most work), but it’s useful to some, and if nothing else, we’ve gotten used to the idea that an artist can control their own works.
The idea that someone can claim ownership to a “style” is hugely problematic, though - it upends the entire history of the practice of visual arts, for one.
Yeah, I think we are on the same page.
I’d like to see a study on the commercial “life expectancy” of different type of artworks, but it seems to have shorten.
Beats me, but that is super cheep for a lawyer to find out. Also the economic damage to you is not just what someone else made off your work. It is what you lost. If I take your work and give it away for free promoting myself, your damage isn’t “the $0 Josh made off your work”, it is the money you couldn’t make because I took the wind out of your market. It is the time you had to invest in stopping me. It is the other work you couldn’t do because of sleepless nights wondering what other madness I will subject you to. Plus any extra the jury (or judge) kicks in on top of that to make me understand I shouldn’t go and do that again. Or at least that is what your lawyer ought to argue, a jury may or may not buy it. Also my knowledge of the law is limited to a class or two in high school decades ago. I’m definitely not a lawyer. You might want to talk to one, in the US at least you can pretty much always get a free short (15min, half an hour) appointment to see if they think if they can do anything… (I mean, sure it was years ago, and maybe too many years, but maybe not…if it is still bugging you, you might as well see if you can do anything about it)
Yeah, ironically, I suspect the commercial life expectancy of work has shortened as the copyright length has increased… But I suspect also, corporatized media is better able to take advantage of works with “long tails,” so they have that incentive to push for longer copyright.
I don’t think it’s so much the ‘image inside typography’.
Because We see that quite a bit.
But we don’t see a SERIES of images…which is what you see here.
Not just a image for one thing…that 'oh well…that’s acceptable…image inside type thing"
But a series of images as a promotion…not one time but several times…with even copying the background colors.
At that point it’s not copying a image, or art work…but copying an advertising campaign.
And given the originals don’t even ‘have the ink dried on them’ as being produced in the 2010’s etc.
Seems like a far stretch, at best they might have been inspired by the artist, but to me, the work is very dramatically different… The French artist’s “new retro wave” style on that first image is so damn copied from current design trends, it is almost a cliche. My guess is they’re both riding the same trends.
Speaking as a graphic designer who does tons of posters and album covers… I’d say 75% of my clients literally say “hey, rip this off,” and email me a Google Images link to a poster or album cover they like. “Make it look as much like that as possible, but use a different font or something.”
My response is first to warn them about copyright infringement and say it’s a bad idea; if they insist, I’ll send them a mockup of what they’re paying me to rip off, along with a few original ideas to try to sway them. If they insist on going with the ripoff, I’ll make sure my invoice/contract makes it clear that it is their responsibility… and I don’t use the project in my portfolio.
These are clearly ripped off, and the work on the new posters is much lower quality, the originals are very well done quality work.
those posters suck. solo and qi`ra work because the lettering isn’t squished so the effect plays well. the other two are just awful. also those ships at the bottom look like weird accent marks from a distance. they lack the other details that tie the design together with polish that the records had. very disappointing ripoff, the only thing that works is bit that was stolen. if the new designer added anything original to the poster i’d be more likely to label it a derivative work inspired by the originals, which is cool. since they don’t they are a flat out copy, period.
Clearly. When it’s just one, it could still be a coincidence, but this is a bit too obvious to just be a coincidence.
That said, I’m not entirely convinced that that’s a problem. Good ideas get copied all the time. This design was clearly great, and credit is due, but I’m not sure that makes it a copyright or other kind of IP violation; there’s differences. It’s not like Disney put Sony’s covers on their own Funk and Jazz albums. They copied the style, but copying styles is the entire history of art. I guess the court will have to decide whether this crosses a line or not.
I’m personally quite happy with Star Wars having such awesome posters.
I thought the same thing. Chewie as Soul makes sense. We don’t know much about Qi’ra yet, but apparently she’s Electronic Funk? Does Han as Funk and Lando as Jazz make sense? I think it does.
