Copyright Issues and Plagiarism Paper
When it comes to using other’s work, I believe it is
okay as long as their work is no longer recognizable to the original version or
if they give permission for it to be used. There are some personal guidelines
that I follow when I use work from other people. For one, I always check to see
if they’ve set up rules or asked for it to not be used. Then, if it’s free to
use or if there isn’t any information regarding the work at all, I go ahead and
use it. At this point, I always make
sure to change the image enough so that it is completely different than before.
I think this is okay because it doesn’t look like the artist’s work any longer.
In a way, it’s the same thing as using an artist’s work of art as inspiration
for your own. If someone paints an impressionist painting, they aren’t said to
be copying Monet or Dali because they are only using an idea or a part of their
work and making it their own.
For
the Cy-Fair Independent School District, it states that, “You cannot use
copyrighted material without written permission from the creator of the
material (or from its copyright holder).” The website also mentions the
specific types of work that cannot be copied which include photos, written
documents, recordings, videos. It says, “Copyright is protection for
intellectual property. Intellectual property consists of anything an individual
has written or created. It might be music, text, pictures, photographs, sounds,
and so on. “ Click Here for source
The
Scholastics Art Competition takes copyright very seriously. They do not want
anyone to copy any else’s material without providing substantial citation and
credit. If even a small part is copied, the submission can be disqualified from
the contest. It also states on the website, that “Copyrights
to a work arise as soon as the work is fixed to a tangible form. For example,
an idea for a painting is not protected until the idea is actually expressed on
a canvas or in another tangible form. An artist or writer need not file
anything in order for his/her work to be protected.” They
hope contestants will be honest and ethical when submitting their work.
The VASE Competition has written in its rules, “Abstain
from any practice which allows plagiarism to violate the ethical standards of
quality art education and the VASE program.” So overall this competition is
just like all the others which prohibit any copying and making sure students
use ethical decisions when submitting their artwork.
Culture
Shapers has the same kind of rules as the other competitions. It is stated on
the website,
“Directly copying or using any portion of a
published image, photograph, album cover, magazine, website, or any other
source is considered plagiarism and will result in disqualification.” But unlike the other competitions, there is also a part
that says if the teacher or parents that instruct the student did not see the
student making the work, it should not be submitted. I think this is silly
especially since I work alone all the time. There is also a rule that a photo
taken by someone other than the participant can only be used as a secondary
reference photo.
For the AP College Board Art test,
there is a section under each category of art that mentions rules about
“Ethics, Artist Integrity, and Plagiarism.” It also says, “It is
unethical, constitutes plagiarism, and often violates copyright law simply to
copy an image (even in another medium) that was made by someone else and
represent it as one’s own.” This is true for every contest that I’ve
mentioned above but what is unique about the college board rules is that is
does allow some copying as long as the individual changes it to make it clearly
their own work., “Any work that makes use of (appropriates) photographs,
published images and/or other artists’ work must show substantial and
significant development beyond duplication. This is demonstrated through manipulation
of the formal qualities, design and/or concept of the source. The student’s
individual “voice” should be clearly evident.” I completely agree with these
rules because this is what I’ve done in my own work in the past. It should be
fine to use other art to help you achieve what you’re trying to make as long as
you change it enough that it cannot be identified as the original artist’s
work.
This
year at Harvard University, 125 students were caught cheating on a final exam.
The professor noticed similarities between several papers turned in and sure
enough, almost half the class had used work from each other. There is not any
information whether the students received punishment for their actions but the
administration has decided to try and focus on reminding the students about
academic integrity for the future. I think the school should have issued
consequences for cheating such as failing grades for the assignment. Otherwise,
they may continue to cheat off one another. It wasn’t fair for them to cheat
because the students were told not to work with one another yet they decided to
take short cuts and use others’ work. This is similar to taking from artists
and using their work as your own which is wrong according to the law.
At
the 2012 Comic-Con, Josh Wattles an expert on copyright laws gave a long
lecture about the laws regarding fan art. He mentioned that the copyright rules
fan artists deal with are called Intellectual Property rights. He also talked
about his three major rules of the trade. The first one he called “playground
rules”, which are the basic rules parents teach their kids about not taking
from others. The next one was the “rules
of life” which included the moral laws about not taking from original creators
and artists. The final law was what he called the “black law” which is the laws
the government has set up and enforced. His lecture went on for another 45
minutes where he went into detail and specifics about the rules behind fan art
and copying the original works of art or artist’s ideas.
There is an artist on DeviantArt named David Kawen who
makes his own versions of Disney princes. He recreates the princes by painting
them in Photoshop wearing little or nothing but underwear….He’s never said why
he does it. On the surface, he most likely does it because he enjoys it and its
funny but maybe he does it to create a fantasy of the innocent Disney characters
we love as kids. He takes them to a new level by twisting them from kid
friendly into extremely inappropriate for kids, the main audience for the movies
from which the characters originated. The images are ironic and make a
statement. I think it is fine for people to do this because they should have
the freedom to manipulate and change the original work, in this case the Disney
princes. They are not harming or slandering anyone by making the artwork so who
cares? And even though they can be described as inappropriate, no one is forced
to look at them.
