A friend of mine wrote me the other day and told me his company was stealing copyrighted work. He was very upset and said that his manager believes that anything on the internet is available to be put on a crappy T-shirt.
He asked my advice on what to do. He was a creative who felt righteous indignation about stealing from other creatives. I had to think about what to say in response.
The first time I was ordered to steal copyrighted material by my boss, I was horrified and felt I should protect the rights of others. It wasn’t so much for monetary gain but for a presentation and involved the work of several dozen illustrators. Nonetheless, it was something for which they should have received payment.
I pushed the point in a meeting on the project, pontificating on the copyright law in front of several executives and the president of the company. Later on, my supervisor informed me that the multi-sleazebag legal department had approved of the plan, claiming that if the copyright owners found out, it “wouldn’t cost more than a hundred dollars or so.”
Once again, I pointed out that the actual figure would be much more and the embarrassment to the corporation would be devastating. I was told not to worry about it and use the material. I did but made a copy of the presentation for my records, just in case. In a worst-case scenario, I didn’t want to be the
art director who stole from other creatives. I knew of at least one other art director who took the fall for the company when the same thing happened. The project was discovered and the art director was fired, while every other art director and designer in the company sat mum, afraid to speak up and say that she had been handed the material and told to use it.
“Just do it and forget about it…it’s not your neck on the line. When your company is sued for thousands of dollars, you’ll be long gone,” I wrote to my friend. I hit send and felt I had given him the best advice available. Later I realized that he would take the blame when the company got caught. I regretted not telling him to nail the company doors shut with everyone inside and burn the place to the ground or poison the employee coffee pot because the penalty would be less than the damage to his professional reputation when he became the scapegoat for his company and their blatant disregard for the law.
The law!
Yes, it’s the law. Using copyrighted material without permission for any commercial usage, which includes presentations, T-shirts, promotional material, in-house posters, etc. is a breach of the copyright law. It does, however, happen every day in every part of the world. If Hello Kitty were a real person, she would die and spin in her grave from all of the illegal usage of her cute and profitable visage. Me-ouch!
YIKES! Obviously this is not a valid licensed product but what lawyer wants to bring the gun shop owner who manufactured this into court? Hello Kitty™ Sanrio
Every creative should know the copyright law, no matter in what country you reside (it’s a global economy!) not only to adhere to it for legal purposes but to protect your own rights as a creative of copyrighted works. There are many books and articles on the subject and I would suggest any source by legal guru Tad Crawford, who works with several arts organizations on artists’ rights.
Knowing the law and being able to intelligently put forth the problems a company could face by unfair usage could save a corporate entity or small business a crippling legal suit and devastating bad publicity—that is, if they listen to you!
As a freelancer, the copyright law not only protects your works but also your right to being paid by a client. The transfer of copyright can only be recognized by written consent to transfer such rights. When a client refuses to pay your invoice (which should be backed up with a contract laying out the transfer of copyright or other usage, contingent on payment), you can withdraw the copyright. After that, it’s no longer just a court case on non-payment but one of copyright violation with much stiffer financial penalties. Clients tend to change their minds on payment when it takes a turn for the very worst.
A very apt image for the copyright issue! ©2001 Steve Bell
I advise young designers who insist on doing free work for companies for “exposure” and the promise of future work (because they know more than I do and just won’t listen to my warnings about doing free work—ah, the passion and verve of youth!) to keep ownership of the copyright and just assign the usage to the company of creepy scammers, er…I mean the client, for a short period of a year so there IS a future in the free work. If the client reneges, don’t renew the assignment of the copyright! I’ve been thanked for that advice and heard more apologies from those who did the free work without a contract and never saw any of the client’s promises come to fruition.
Fair usage
According to an entry on Wikipedia:
The fair use defense to copyright infringement was codified for the first time in section 107 of the 1976 Act. Fair use was not a novel proposition in 1976, however, as federal courts had been using a common law form of the doctrine since the 1840s (an English version of fair use appeared much earlier). The Act codified this common law doctrine with little modification. Under section 107, the fair use of a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement, even if such use technically violates section 106. While fair use explicitly applies to use of copyrighted work for criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research purposes, the defense is not limited to these areas. The Act gives four factors to be considered to determine whether a particular use is a fair use:
The purpose and character of the use (commercial or educational, transformative or reproductive);
- the nature of the copyrighted work (fictional or factual, the degree of creativity);
- the amount and substantiality of the portion of the original work used; and
- the effect of the use upon the market (or potential market) for the original work.
The Act was later amended to extend the fair use defense to unpublished works.
As any writer on this and other blogs know, or should know, is that under fair use, we can show copyrighted work as mentioned above. As a designer, does the use I outlined in the first part of this article fall under fair use (presentations within a company or to a client)? It does not.
What is a “derivative work?”
Vanilla Ice suffered the question of derivative work with his well-loved Ice, Ice Baby hit. Was it lifted, or “sampled” from David Bowie’s Under Pressure? Mr. Ice argued the beat was completely different and monkeys could fly out of his rear end.
Wikipedia defines the subject as such:
A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more pre-existing works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work.”
The Wikipedia entry uses a piece by Marcel Duchamp of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and claims it is “often used by law professors to illustrate the legal concept of derivative work. Obviously da Vinci isn’t available to launch a suit for the use of his work but other works have been used in such a manner.
©Andy Warhol
Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can, for instance, bore a trademarked logo, but the Campbell’s Soup Company chose not to sue. Perhaps the free advertising involved persuaded them to not cause problems in the public eye. In this case it is worth noting that a critical piece of any lawsuit is proving damages. As with the problem my friend faces at work, using copyrighted works and logos, there is a commercial profit made from the images and that is another consideration in bringing suit. Collage artists, such as Richard Hamilton (know as the “father of pop art”), used other people’s images in his work, getting by with fair use. Leer más “Moral dilemma: My company steals from other creatives”
Claiming egregious IP infringement, 
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