mine, my own, my precious
So, riddle me this, witterers. (While we're running with the Gollum theme). What is the difference, in your opinion, between the following, in purely ethical or moral terms? (Please leave legal implications out, I consider them to be a giant red herring in this particular debate).
The context is the current MicFic project - we are producing a hard copy of our first volume of stories, just for ourselves, no profit or general distribution involved. We bogged down last night in a genuinely divided argument about whether or not you needed to attribute the artwork you used to illustrate your story if you'd manipulated it extensively or if it was a small part of a large collage of images. The whole thing has blindsided me completely, because to me it's perfectly clear-cut. If you use someone else's work, you say so. The interesting thing is that in pretty much everyone else's mind, there seems to be a huge divide between the written word and art. People generally agreed that you shouldn't use someone else's wording without attribution, but were fine with the idea of using clip art or Creative Commons licensed stuff without referencing the source.
Thinking about it in the cold, clear light of day and without the inflaming effect of lots of wine, I think that for me this becomes an issue of recognisability. To bring it into my own area of expertise, postmodern re-interpretations of fairy tale don't step outside the text to explicitly reference the tale/s they're messing with - they tend to use well-known ones and expect you to recognise them, and the stories kinda lose their point if you don't know the original. Postmodern pastiches of well-known artworks likewise don't tend to explicitly say what they're playing with, you're meant to know. (Case in point: all those riffs on Magritte's "Ce n'est pas un pipe", like the MtG card on BoingBoing earlier this year). In these cases, recognition of the original artwork is built into the new artwork on a fundamental level.
But to me, if you're using low-profile images to make your own mash-up art, you kinda owe it to the humble artist to nod to their existence and their contribution to your work. It's still your work. You've transformed the elements you used, but someone still originated them, and to me it feels profoundly wrong not to say so. And, while I think my awareness of this is heightened by being in academia, and in particular by having spent the last six months trying to beat back plagiarism in the faculty, I think the principle holds true any damn where.
But YMMV, and I'd love to know what everyone thinks.
- Creating a new story as a response to an old one, with the new one self-consciously referencing the old one but without using its actual wording. (Postmodernism Red Flag!)
- Creating a new story as a response to an old one, using chunks of actual wording from the old one.
- Creating a new piece of art by re-drawing and re-interpreting images based on pictures you found on the internet.
- Creating a new piece of art by cutting and pasting a bunch of different images you found on the internet.
- Creating a new piece of art by radically manipulating an image you found on the internet.
The context is the current MicFic project - we are producing a hard copy of our first volume of stories, just for ourselves, no profit or general distribution involved. We bogged down last night in a genuinely divided argument about whether or not you needed to attribute the artwork you used to illustrate your story if you'd manipulated it extensively or if it was a small part of a large collage of images. The whole thing has blindsided me completely, because to me it's perfectly clear-cut. If you use someone else's work, you say so. The interesting thing is that in pretty much everyone else's mind, there seems to be a huge divide between the written word and art. People generally agreed that you shouldn't use someone else's wording without attribution, but were fine with the idea of using clip art or Creative Commons licensed stuff without referencing the source.
Thinking about it in the cold, clear light of day and without the inflaming effect of lots of wine, I think that for me this becomes an issue of recognisability. To bring it into my own area of expertise, postmodern re-interpretations of fairy tale don't step outside the text to explicitly reference the tale/s they're messing with - they tend to use well-known ones and expect you to recognise them, and the stories kinda lose their point if you don't know the original. Postmodern pastiches of well-known artworks likewise don't tend to explicitly say what they're playing with, you're meant to know. (Case in point: all those riffs on Magritte's "Ce n'est pas un pipe", like the MtG card on BoingBoing earlier this year). In these cases, recognition of the original artwork is built into the new artwork on a fundamental level.
But to me, if you're using low-profile images to make your own mash-up art, you kinda owe it to the humble artist to nod to their existence and their contribution to your work. It's still your work. You've transformed the elements you used, but someone still originated them, and to me it feels profoundly wrong not to say so. And, while I think my awareness of this is heightened by being in academia, and in particular by having spent the last six months trying to beat back plagiarism in the faculty, I think the principle holds true any damn where.
But YMMV, and I'd love to know what everyone thinks.