Art Theft, Plagiarism, Copyright Infringement

8 min read

Deviation Actions

Nannana's avatar
By
Published:
18.1K Views
Never needed to keep a journal. I decided to install it today just to post this.
There is a terrible story about an user that had a complain about copyright infringment, in which she was not the owner of the copyright over the original character as the original belongs to Lauren Faust / Hasbro. The girl unleashed her fanbase (other than all the other pricks around the internet that have no other interesting stuff to do and find it funny) against a Community Manager, Administrator of Deviantart, which i find to be an otrageous thing to do.
I searched for a simple yet effective description of what Copyright means and i found it surprisingly non other than on the respective bashed admin's journal, as a very old entry.
Probably if the people would have bothered to browse and read, they would have been illuminated why the admin took the actions he did on the so often posted screenshot.

What I want to do here is to use the overall issue to compare the differences between copying, plagiarism, and copyright infringement.
These three subjects are all tightly intertwined; sometimes they can all be the same thing and sometimes they are not but the reason I want to talk about them briefly is because the Great Campaign Against Art Theft rarely bothers to notice the distinction and for CEA in 2010 we are pushing a bit more education on these subjects out into the community.

Another problem is that the vague term "art theft" gets applied to all three of these situations and as I've pointed out the "art theft" and "stealing" terms just really don't acknowledge the sometimes subtle shades of grey (not to mention not being the right terms to use at all).

Copyright Infringement

Copyright Infringement is what most people are referring to when most people scream "art theft" or "stealing" but of course "stealing" and infringement aren't the same thing.

Copyright is a bundle of five rights which are exclusive to the copyright owner. These rights include the right to reproduce, distribute, create derivative works based upon, preform and display the protected work.

The owner controls all of these functions, subject to certain limitations and exceptions built into the law.

For most people copyright infringement involves the posting of their work or the manipulation (or "blending" or "editing" or "rendering") of their work. In these cases your actual work has been taken and directly used in some fashion.

If you created a fan art upon an original artwork, you detain no copyright over the respective image and you have no right to scream *art theft* over someone who copyied/traced over a piece of fan art of yours.

There are a bunch of different ways which an infringement can occur but there are also exceptions and other situations where infringement might not be occurring so it is really important that you recognize when actual infringement has occurred and that you know how to proceed to remedy the problem (hint: mob action and death threats is not part of the procedure)

Plagiarism

Sometimes plagiarism and copyright infringement are the same thing; sometimes they are not.

A plagiarist is a person who poses as the originator or a work which they actually obtained from someone else; they claim to have come up with words they didn't really write, ideas they didn't think up, facts they didn't discover, etc, etc.

When you guys talks about people "stealing your ideas" you are talking about plagiarism.

Now copyright infringement and plagiarism aren't always the same thing. For the purpose of plagiarism the material "stolen" doesn't have to be protected by copyright and the plagiarist cannot be sued for copyright infringement if all that they take are unprotected ideas or facts or things which can be considered to be in the public domain.

If someone were to take and submit one of your original works to deviantART and claim it as their own work, that person would be considered to be a plagiarist as well as a copyright infringer.

If someone were to take and submit your original work but not claim it as their own they would simply be committing copyright infringement.

If that same person were to take and submit the Mona Lisa they would not be committing copyright infringement (because the Mona Lisa is in the public domain) but if they claimed that it was their own painting then they would be considered a plagiarist.

Copying

Aside from plagiarism, which is essentially copying while taking credit, we have just plain old copying.

Just like with the comparison between copyright infringement and plagiarism, simple copying is not necessarily either of those and this is where things get really, really confusing.

Artists have been copying from each other since the dawn of time but copying isn't always plagiarism and it also doesn't necessarily equal copyright infringement either.

Copying usually becomes copyright infringement when the copying is "verbatim"; the entire work is copied and copied exactly. There is usually no doubt that infringement has happened when two works are essentially identical in every way.

If there has only been "substantial" copying involved, with the works being obviously similar but not exactly the same it can become harder to have a valid claim of infringement, even more when the works are only superficially similar.

The main problem with copying is that the underlying idea behind your work, lets say a wolf howling at the moon in a dark forest, isn't protected under copyright.

Your exact rendition of the idea is protected and copyrighted to you, but anyone anywhere is free to use that idea in their own work, and many will do so without ever seeing your work and it is entirely possible that the works could simply share superficial similarities by coincidence without any copying having occurred.

Try Googling "wolf howling at the moon" and check the image results to see the sort of superficial similarities I'm talking about.



If you managed to follow all of this you'll hopefully carry away some notion of how nuanced and laced with subtleties these issues are in reality; something which the Black-or-White proclamation of "art theft" completely fails to acknowledge.

It's the biggest reason I'd love to see the community abandon use of that phrase (along with "stealing") and adopt some of the terms I've discussed here. I think once we do we might be able to see a lessening of some of what you could call "batshit insane" reactions people have to situations which don't necessarily call for such a highly dramatic reaction.

We've got millions of artists here and we get ten times that many visitors so it's high time we all started to better understand the issues which affect us as a community; we're all creative people here and we draw our inspiration from other artists even if we don't do it deliberately.

We can all probably name one person we know of who got "popular" here by copying the work of some other little-known artist and not bothering to credit them (plagiarism) and for every one of those people we can probably name five others who have obviously copied and "borrowed" ideas from works they've seen, not to mention the chronic problem of copyright infringement which is practically built into Internet use.

Famous plagiarists that i know: J.K. Rowling to name one. Though this didn't stopped people to love her characters and buy her books.
Another one is George R.R. Martin who integrated in his books an entire book of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Hawkmistress! respectively. But nobody cares as long as Martin's books are hella entertaining. This doesn't make him less a plagiarist.
And to conclude, here is a list of really famous artists that copied, and they are not less famous because of that (example Picasso, Degas, Cezanne..):

www.redbubble.com/people/blyth…

Also you should read this journal: fourteenthstar.deviantart.com/…
Explains very well and in detail what is dA policy about tracing!

UPDATE!

1.J.K. Rowling's plagiarism case:
greenbooks.theonering.net/gues…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Po…
www.examiner.com/article/j-k-r…

There is plenty of material outthere that discuss the argument. Go and do a serious search without being a fanboy. I love Rowling and her books, this doesn't mean she did not copyied.

2.This applies to G.R.R. Martin as well; who did not read both authors/books cannot understand what i'm talking about. It's pointless to post links.

3.The link versus the famous artists that copied or traced photos is just one of many. I learned this in school, that was just an example.
The pictures does not belong to the respective artists, they were used as references. If you do a search you will be surprised to discover how many of them copyied.
You would want to give a watch to this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd-dqU…

I'm not gonna bother to answer to each of the comments. Google exists for this purpose, is an awesome tool, use it!
If you are an avid reader you don't need anyone to tell you what did you read is real or fake.
© 2014 - 2024 Nannana
Comments396
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Username-91's avatar
I love how you are pretending how you know everything about copyright and call the artist who complained "so-called" artist when you are the one who posted a stolen piece. Oh, the irony. Perhaps you might want to do research first before you decide to accuse someone of something he didn't do. According to Google, the image you posted is from 2010, while according to TinEye the image that you submitted is from 2008. The Journal that you posted about art robbery and copyright infringement lost all validations when I saw a stolen piece of work in your Gallery. You are a terrible liar, and you should feel bad because of what you did. Plagiarism is dealt with by a plagiarist, a person who takes the other work as his own.

The statement in your Journal doesn't make sense: A quick search by Net ActThe Berne ConventionTRIPSCopyright Act, TTP, TTIP, and the DMCA. My favorite is the Net Act. You don't have to have a commercial plan to violate copyright. That blows the whole “if it's not causing financial damage” argument out of the water. I don't know how much more mistaken “facts” this journal has. I noticed the two most glaring false statements and gave up reading I should be a little shocked, but I'm not. Your facts are full of errors and make no sense. 90% of the things you have written have nothing to do with plagiarism and copyright infringement. You are a big hypocrite. I cannot believe as other people said how this Journal received so much attention when it's full loopholes, inaccurate claims, and meaningless facts.

You've upset many people by writing bullshits that don't make any sense. Especially about copyright, there are so many mistakes about copyright that they don't make any sense. You don't help people; you don't show them how to follow copyright laws, you confuse them by making them startled by the law. You refer them to a copyright phobia; you thus make people afraid of any copyright-related movement. Please, don't discuss what robbery is when you cannot interpret the word itself. You're only misleading people who may be unaware of the laws and implications of said laws. Making them more prone to steal or even be stolen from through leniency, lack, or sympathy for university artists. When it comes to fan-art and plagiarism, you are wrong about those parts.