thanks everyone who commented on this post and highlighted the copyright issues.
- jules
update: the hack has been reinstated.
DON'T MISS A HACK. CONNECT WITH ME.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
11 comments:
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Can you provide a little more info? While I guess I can see how it might be a copyright violation to enlarge copyrighted pieces of art and frame them, I can't see how a description of that process is infringing. IT seems to me that the hack could've been updated to say "be sure to use art in the public domain or get the artist's permission". Why did we lose the entire article?!
ReplyDeleteHey Jules- No worries, I liked the thought that went into it, just not the fact someone elses art was being used. (I also missed the IKEA part of the hack, but hey, I'm new here.)
ReplyDeleteI would still advocate that a person use the process on their own work. I know that it can be hella-expensive to get photo graphic images enlarged up to that size... so it still may be a good hack.
Take care
Larry
Well done.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to note, too, that there are some great free sources of copyrighted, but reproducible works.
ReplyDeleteFor instance Flickr Creative Commons.
Yeah, not a copyright issue. German law only protects image copyright for 70 years from first date of publication, which has passed for these images. You can't even make a "copyright on the derivitive reproduction" that the fellow scanned argument as German (and US) law affords such "unartistic renderings" no status under copyright law. I don't mean to belabor the point but this is really a fair use issue. You are just as free to make copies of old Karl's images as you are to make copies of Mark Twain's works, or the US constitution, or the Magna Carta, or the Iliad. Please use your rights to access and modify cultural heritage, it's YOUR heritage after all.
ReplyDeleteCheck out:
http://www.chillingeffects.org/
For more info.
Poorly and anaemically done. My respect for this site has waned. Please reinstate the original article, possibly tacking on a reminder if you feel you need to acknowledge the copyright maximalists at all or if you genuinely feel that you readers are incapable of making up their own minds on the legality of their own actions. As anonymous/10:39 has said, a description of a process which might be infringing is not in itself infringing. If what david says is true, the process described on your site was not infringing in the first place.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I can't see the original thread from here. Not now :(
To all of the Whiney Little B**stards,
ReplyDeleteI used Karl Blossfeldts images (http://images.google.com/images?q=karl+blossfeldt&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&um=1&sa=X&oi=images&ct=title) from an IKEA notecard, to embellish my own home- becasue I like his images- and they werent avil in the scale that I wanted for a wall grouping.
The point that many critics seemed to be missing is this: THESE WERE FOR MY OWN USE. I wasn't selling them, profiting off of his dead soul, or taking away anything from his creation.
What I chose to do, to "make art" is of no ones legal business.
Also, I design and build furniture. I like to think that all of my designs are copyrighted, and therefore protected. If I meet w/a potential Mfg- I ask for a Non-Disclosure agreement to be signed.
Still-I have had my designs "knocked-off", and sold by a very well known, Northbrook,ILL based company. Do I have $50,000 to file legal action against them.
No.
Do they?
You betcha.
So, my point is- if anyone is/should be sensitive to copyright issues- it would be me. But my simple IKEA-hack, enlarging some "open-source" images, lifted from an IKEA notecard, to make some wall look pretty, in my own apartment- does NOT deserve the negative rants, and vile remarks that others "had" to share.
Whoa, hang on here. You mean an entire post was deleted because it might--MIGHT--violate some nebulous copyright laws? I have to agree that a description of a process is not itself an infringement of any copyright, and that the deletion of the post was unnecessary. A disclaimer would have sufficed.
ReplyDeleteSad.
ReplyDeleteCheck out the original article at http://tinyurl.com/2qtzve. I suspect that those who complained are falling for the propaganda disseminated by the RIAA, MPAA and others who say that they control what you do with a work, not the consumer. The artist in question presumeably sold his work to Ikea, which Ikea sold to Randall, which Randall in turn used. Everyone got paid. What if Randall had purchased an art projector and shined the images on his wall instead thus enlarging them? Would that have been an infringing act? I don't think so.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link to the original article, dave. It's even more clear to me now that the removal of this post was quite unwarranted. Bad show, Ikea Hacker!
ReplyDeleteKarl Blossfeldt[1], the photographer in question, died in 1932, so I doubt he granted an exclusive license on the images to Ikea, which was founded in 1943. Being dead and all. Hence his images are in the Public Domain in Germany (the country of his birth, and presumably where the works were first published) and in the United Kingdom (which is where I live). Both countries use the normal copyright lengths of 70 years pma[2], but it's the German one which counts here (I think!)
I doubt an art card pack containing simple reproductions of public domain image is copyrightable in any jurisdiction: this reuse doesn't add significantly to the work, nor is it particularly imaginative or creative. It's a mere reproduction or aggregation.
Which Ikea are free to do, of course. This is a Good Thing, because Ikea get to make money by selling the cards and not having to pay royalties on the images, and because we get to appreciate the artist's work.
So what's going on here? There's a lot of ignorance of basic copyright law here, to turn some of the complaints in the original thread on their head. People: get yourself informed on this, visit the chillingeffects site linked above, and understand what the shills and maximalists are trying to do to the culture we all own. This is important.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Blossfeldt
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_length