When a case of alleged design theft on the Web — the appropriation of one or more elements of a site’s design, without permission — is exposed, there is an elite group of mentally-challenged individuals who spring into action to defend said theft. Their arguments never vary; they stay the course and seem to assume that if they simply repeat themselves often enough, their lack of functioning neurons will be ignored.
Broadly speaking, these arguments fall into three categories. I pray you’ll forgive my abominable Latin grammar in describing them.
This category of arguments is predicated on the assumption that something which is not aesthetically pleasing is not to be afforded protection, and thus may be appropriated by anyone without fear of repercussion.
Proponents of this principle typically begin their comments by pointing out that the site from which the design was appropriated is, in their humble opinions, ugly. Often this is merely a stepping-stone to the more advanced turpes omnia, which deems all of the sites involved to be visually unpleasant.
The correct counter-argument involves suggesting that, by this logic, it should be perfectly acceptable to steal your neighbor’s Pontiac Aztek.
This style is more properly a subset of the better-known informal fallacy tu quoque, and is centered on the allegation that all designers engage in theft. Typically, reference is made to the line “bad artists copy, great artists steal”, often attributed to Pablo Picasso, and anecdotes will be told regarding designers who have large collections of misappropriated fonts.
Due to the regularity with which ideas are recycled and cross-pollinated among designers and, indeed, artists of all sorts, this is at first a beguiling argument; typically the line between “inspiration” (as it is often called) and “plagiarism” is possessed of a sharpness inversely proportional to an observer’s distance from the works in question.
The most effective response to this line of reasoning avoids that logical quagmire and instead asks whether Vanilla Ice, in light of Ice Ice Baby‘s outright appropriation of the bass line from Under Pressure, should immediately be elevated to the pantheon of great artists.
This school of thought has developed only recently, but has been prolific in its output. Their philosophy can be summarized by the principle that anything which is placed on a publicly-accessible web server loses the protection of copyright law.
Note that this premise is taken to be true a priori and so is assumed to require no justification from empirical experience; thus it is not necessary for proponents to make reference to case law, or to identify where in Title 17 of the United States Code they believe this principle is enshrined.
When debating with disciples of this school, be sure to make reference to the number of times their axiom has allowed defendants to prevail in lawsuits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Compiling the above listing would not have been possible without a vibrant community of parasitic “designers” whose ethical senses are detectable only by electron microscope. In addition, I am greatly indebted to Greg Storey for the variety of flora and fauna I was able to study, in their native habitat, at the comments section of his post entitled “Scab”.
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I think it might just be me, but the addition of Latin to this post makes it all the more enjoyable.
Personally, I haven’t decided on the issue as a whole. But I do not understand the motivation to make such disturbing rip-offs. How can one be proud of their work if they merely lean on the thoughts and skills of others?
Turpem tuus is basically just a specific form of Ignoratio Elenchi or Red Herring.
A very weak response to “auferet omnes”. Substitute Vanilla Ice/Ice Ice Baby for any number of great artists who have done exactly that, except with talent, and your defense falls apart. Or do you really think any musician who uses samples can’t be called a great artist?
Psst. It was supposed to be a… what do you call it? Oh, yeah, a joke.
The Latin is cool, but the examples are problematic.
I commend your efforts, but it’s dangerous to provide examples that are full of holes. Those seeking to invalidate your claims need look no further than the material with which you’ve provided them.
Stealing The Aztec. You should make it clear that you understand the difference between intellectual property re-appropriation and theft. Depriving someone else of a car is different from copying their published work. If you fail to communicate that you understand this, the trolls will unleash their wrath upon you, barking that you’re just the same as the RIAA for equating piracy with theft. An alternative would be to say “transcribing the blueprints for the Aztec from the Pontiac ‘design’ room”.
The greatness of Vanilla Ice. While we need not elevate “Ice Ice Baby” or its abominable creator/re-appropriator, the venerable cover song (or variations thereof) format is not ripe territory for demonstrating that plagiarism is bad. As a previous poster said, maybe we don’t like ‘Nilla, but plenty of other remixes/mashups/samebasslines are superior to original material. The fact that you happened to choose one that could be the brunt of comedy weakens your argument.
RIAA lawsuits. Asking someone whether their purported ideal has held up in court does not at all invalidate the ideal. By appealing to law, you run your own argument aground because there’s plenty of precent in law that is highly immoral. It’s like saying, “You support a ban on torture, eh? Yeah, and how many times has our legislature agreed with that? None, lately. Ha!” Contrary to your statements, it’s not necessary for design-stealer-defenders to cite case law. That would be putting them to a different and problematic standard. What is necessary is exposing their fallacies by illuminating the difference between things in the world that are free for anyone to take, and are free to take but require recognition or compensation for said taking.
In short, the arguments you’ve identified are great. But your responses to them are shoddy.
Psst. It was supposed to be a… what do you call it? Oh, yeah, a joke.
And yeah, anybody who wants to take this as a serious work of rigorous logical argument is going to get that same reply copy/pasted at them. If the situation calls for a work of rigorous logical argument I’ll gladly provide it — I took plenty of it in college. And if the situation calls for in-depth discussions of the nature of intellectual property, I’ll gladly provide that too; I lived comfortably for a summer on a research grant dedicated to precisely that purpose.
But this situation? This situation calls for mockery, which I have gladly provided.
James, hehe on the cut-paste, and lol at everyone trying to poke holes in a satirical argument. :)
Your article resonates with me in a certain sense because I’m one of those not-quite-designers who sees inspiration in just about every blog and web page I cruise to, and I often think, “Wouldn’t that be cool to do on my site”, but I also worry about using a good idea and copying the implementation as well.
For example, your “Recent weblog entries”, “Recent links”, and “Recent comments” are all things I’m thinking about putting on my own not-quite-design blog, not only because I’ve seen them here but also because I’ve seen them elsewhere and I like the idea.
The problem comes down to what if I put them on my site and someone says, “You copied that!” simply because I happen to use a similar colour scheme. Fortunately my current colour scheme is fairly atrocious so I shouldn’t have to worry about that happening this time. :)
Honestly, I don’t worry about copying too much because I’ve noticed that good designers can update and pull a great design out of their butts, seemingly overnight, when they feel that the old design was becoming too “common”, making the copiers work harder and ultimately screw something up and then are left laughed at by the community at large.
What about people who inadvertently get ripped off by plagiarists hired to create a web site? Well, hopefully they’ll learn a valuable lesson about the web without wasting too much money.
“Gottle’o geer, gottle’o geer.”
So… what will Greg Storey’s (Airbag) defense be if it turns out that he’s a “thief” as mentioned here?
“Andy”, why don’t you ask him about it instead of trotting out the old tu quoque here?
“James,”
I did. He hasn’t relpied.
I’m wondering, though, wouldn’t that be a double standard? He made his post(s) before asking the accused thief, too…
Incidentally, I’m not defending Sean Alsobrooks or anybody’s “theft.”
I just find it terribly interesting that someone who makes as many posts about the evils of design “theft” may be guilty of it himself.
A double standard on whose part? I propose that you ask Greg about this, and you try to hold his actions to what I say to you? There’s some conceptual confusion there. Perhaps he was misusing the image, perhaps it was intentional, perhaps it wasn’t, but right now I don’t know and I don’t choose to say anything about it until I do.
Greg did know that something inappropriate had happened with the winery site, because he knows the guys behind Cork’d and, I believe, knows some folks at Joyent. I also know some folks at Joyent, and thus I knew that something inappropriate had happened. Thus there was no “accused” in that situation; from Greg’s perspective it was pretty obvious. Similarly, from my perspective it was pretty obvious. I can’t speak for Greg, but my personal opinion is that when it’s open and shut like that, there’s no dilemma about whether to speak out; had it been me, I probably would have posted a snarky comment about how I didn’t realize Joyent had bought a vineyard, but that’s just my style and not anyone else’s.
The provenance of the Longboard image he used is, however, still in doubt; it certainly looks suspicious, but I don’t know enough about how he obtained it to be able to say anything with certainty; hence I don’t see justification to speak out about it right now.
Of course I realize that what I’ve just said doesn’t really matter to you, because you’re evidently bursting at the seams with glee to be able to sling allegations of hypocrisy, so I’ll just point out that for now I’ve spoken my peace on the topic.
I snorked a few times reading this. Good stuff. It genuinely reads like an intro philosophy textbook summarizing the (fallacious) arguments against a certain theory.
For good reason, I think most design-types around here agree with you on the serious business, and it’s cool that you brought a bit of sarcasm to it. You’ve got style, my friend, and I like that.
Quando omni flunkus moritati.
Cheers!
Greg has explained himself on this Flickr thread, and there are almost no similarities between this incident and the Faulker winery one…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vertigo25/261132690/
I feel like I need to get something off of my chest: I have been working on a design for a client and I have used the striped+gradient visual effect on their site. I got the idea for the visual effect from your site. I hope you don’t mind. If you’d like, I can send you a link to the site once it’s up and running.
Dude, nobody owns the idea of “gradient with stripes” :)
And so long as you didn’t just rip the image off my server, I wouldn’t care anyway…
well, one way to minimize such theft, would be to inhibit the right click save option via mouse, by just different coding programs. I’ve actually come across such things, I think it was dotphoto.com, if one tried to click on the work (photos) you’d just have a copyright message pop up informing one of the ownership rights…so basically no one can copy a single photo off of that web.
Don’t take this as a personal affront, but “no right click” scripts are a guaranteed sign of amateur work. Getting around them is so easy it’s not even funny:
And so on and so forth. People who peddle “no right click” scripts as a way of “protecting” anything are just selling snake oil.
No, I didn’t copy the image straight away. I just took the idea, but drew a new image in Photoshop. It was actually kind of hard to get the pixels lined up properly so that, when repeating, you couldn’t see a break/artifact in the diagonal lines.
I did end up grabbing your background and zooming in on it in great detail to see how the pixels lined up, and whether or not the lines were aliased, but there was no way I could use the same image (mine is a different heigh/colour).
Listen to that James Bennet, he seems to be the only one here livng in the world.
Not that it would matter to someone that would write this idiocy, but the pseudo-Picasso quote is actually T.S. Eliot, “All writers borrow from other writers, the great ones steal openly.” Note that pro writers, who actually have a clear standard for what is copyrightable and what is plagiarism, don’t waste time in such finger-wagging ‘debates.” There is nothing so amateur as this impotent whining posing as argument.
Some theft is agreeably obnoxious, but I sort of agree with the auferet omnes school of thought. Design is by and large recycling old ideas and occasionally stumbling on to new ones, usually by accident. I find no shame in recycling old ideas, though I’d say it needs to be done with respect for others work. I think everyone should be able to agree with this, but the level respect is subjective.
Copywrite is being overextended in my opinion, not just in terms of 20 year extensions, but in a war of perception. What used to not be illegal (granted no profit motive) is now a violaiton, and what was once known as infringement is being retaught as theft. So I feel the need to react against this wave.
Fonts as printed on paper can’t be copyrighted for historical reasons, fact and ideas can’t be copyrights, but more and more the lines are getting fuzzy and it doesn’t sit well with me.
Oh.. and thanks for the django user post which got me out here.. I will appropriate it into a larger work, respectfully :)