Certainly I never gave anyone the right to reproduce the image of Junior Brown (shown above) and I can bet that the New Yorker Magazine (for whom I made the image originally) gave no rights either.

Sometimes, it’s just an accident (maybe???: Robert Miles Runyon Illustration (1961); Concert Poster (2003). Sometimes for gig/concert posters, it’s just a fun influence. Other times, it’s just a blatant rip-off.

Ward Schumaker! What an honor to have you come by! I believe that example is one of those “that’s just not cool” situations where the designer basically lifted it and pretended it was theirs. Harshness.

I made that piece in 2007. Someone in the Gigposters community emailed me about the cut-n-paste shenanigans. Already had words with the offender. He apologized. A lot. Case closed.

Datz! Your works are fantastic! Brilliance! Glad to hear the case is closed.

Some of these seem like a deliberate nod to the original iconic design (Clockers/Anatomy of a Murder, Funny Girl/concert poster.) Sometimes there are honest mistakes, we are exposed to so much imagery at such a rapid pace these days that stuff gets lodged in our subconscious and comes out in our work. Other examples just seem like blatant copying and are kinda shameful – especially if the designer thinks the source design is so obscure that no one will know…

Freak!

Some of these are blatant rip offs, (like ward’s and the one with the house on a cliff in the corner) A lot of these are nicely done homages… or clever re-appropriations.

As artist we should allow some room for creative reproduction. At the end of the day it’s better to be good then original.

[...] este super apanhado do blog World Famous Design Junkies dá um banho de informação quando o assunto é o conhecido [...]

It’s not a coincidence the most of the copies are concert posters, and that’s just plain ’cause the poster art is stalled at these “copy-paste” era, wher anyone with photoshop is a “designer” and just consolidated artists (and labels) pays for their art.

The Against Me! poster is mine. It was a very deliberate homage to the original movie poster.

gg i thought so

ok, here’s the bigger question: where does post-modern appropriation stop and plagarism start?

in a simply B&W PC-stupid world, you begin to find that everything starts to turn grey. my position is that EVERYTHING is plagarism to a degree. we don’t learn to walk by invention, but by copying. hemingway didn’t INVENT the words he wrote with. he used the same words that his contemporaries and his his forebearers did.

further i take the extreme views of EVERYTHING being a copy of something (i can usually put the truth to that with a little research) and, conversely, i think that NOTHING is plagarism. the ‘von dutch’ school of thought was the simplest. he publicly stated that he held NO copyright to his work. when it got out there, he felt it was fair game. basically: eat all you want, i can make more.

as a capper, i want to point out that i wasn’t copying that MAD cover (with that Makers poster), i didn’t even remember it (by the way, your repro is in b&w. you lost 99% of the design by using that crappy b&w version. is that plagarism? or not? what if i used your repro of that cover. is is still ‘stealing”? but, it’s virtually not the cover. it’s so confusing.)

in reality i was stealing the image from a punk poster/telephone pole flyer whipped up by lonnie stacato, a manager/relative of the makers. he did a wonderful poster using that partiular finger image. they wanted to use it on their cover, so i xeroxed off their poster and used it straight across. it wasn’t until a couple of years later somebody pointed it out to me that it was MAD cover. it’s actually the legendary kelly freas’ hand. in my opinion, that makes it even BETTER.

so, at what point does it become plagarism. in a culture that reproduces so many generations that the original authorship is lost, does it become “unPC” and “non-original (what? original? i’m not there is such a thing.)

i think that if you are going to post s big self-righteous sight like this, you need to get REAL EXACTING with your definitions. otherwise, it’s a mess.

the only person i thought i was copying was lonnie stacatto. who knew?

i think this stuff is important, but your presentation is a little far sighted (aka myopic.).

one last thing. this ain’t art. it’s graphic design. it’s a collaborative form. we make client’s look good. we take their products/ideas/input.visions and present it to the world through this medium of image and type. and advert. we don’t follow our muses to create original artworks,. we make cultural artifacts – advertisements that outlive their function and become these weird bits of archaeology. not art. artifacts.

Thank you for stopping by AC! I DO love the things you do! I am glad you took the time to make a more exacting definition of this, too, as it’s such a hard subject.

Put it all in the public domain and imagine the great things that could come out. If only there was a utility that brought it all together. http://search.creativecommons.org/ is convenient, but just think of all the amazing and amazingly horrendous things that a wiki-esque model could produce.

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[...] World Famous Design Junkies » Extreme Graphic Design Plagiarism 10Mar posted by Alex               filed under Uncategorized via worldfamousdesignjunkies.com [...]

Great article, I was hoping to see the cbs logo and the story behind the creation of it.
Keep posting.

[...] via [...]

A stamp labeled “Russian Space Stamp (1961)” is actually a Hungarian stamp. There’s a difference. I wonder how many other works were mislabeled. Therefore the credibility level of the article is questionable.

more than half of these are concert posters.

concert posters often use famous imagery or other people’s work because it grabs attention, and they often do it to be ironic.

Not to excuse plagiarism (because there is no excuse for it), but maybe if people stopped demanding so much design work for free, they would copy other people’s designs a lot less. I would imagine it’s much easier to justify phoning it in when you’re not getting compensating for your time and ideas anyway.

Most important comment yet.

- http://www.posterpage.ch/div/news09/n091128.htm

- http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5551512&id=179504196180

- http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5551513&id=179504196180

- http://www.grafitat.com/2010/03/16/prohibido-copiar/

It is a looooooong subject, isn’t it?

[...] do Grêmio tocado no Guitar Hero Humor | Como não contrair AIDS (por Ricky Gervais) Design | Os plágios mais descarados do Design Games | Uma imagem que desafia que sabe tudo sobre games Humor | Como alguns filmes deveriam [...]

Just a couple notes: in my view whether something is “art” or “commerce” depends more upon how I perceive it than the original intention. There are not many illustrations I consider art but someone like Gary Taxali comes along and does an illustration that meets my definition of art (purely subjective, something about how long I’d be willing to have it up on my wall, or if I’d allow it to be hung on my wall in the first place).
second: a few years back, a work by my wife, Vivienne Flesher, was stolen off the cover of CA magazine and used on tens of thousands of bottles of wine. We only found out about it through a friend who ‘congratulated’us. We sued and around our house the money she got became known as her “Petite Guggenheim grant”, allowing her to spend much of the next year doing personal work.

[...] This article makes me feel a whole lot less guilty about the poster I designed for my Undergrad Show at Utah State University last year (right). In my opinion I think I definitely turned it into my own by using the layout created by the ever so inspiring Aesthetic Appartus (left). I used Picasso drawings of bulls (my school’s mascot) instead of blind contoured horses. After reading the World Famous Design Junkies article on design plagerism, give me your 2 cents. Am I bad a person? Not once did I claim this piece to be fully original. And I don’t want to say that everyone should copy or that it’s ok. There’s a difference into what you make into your own and what you copy exact. Most pieces shown in the article are ridiculous. I repeat, RI-DIC-U-LOUS! [...]

Another one!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shypsi/4441939487/

http://newgrass.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/bauhaus-1923.jpg

[...] Has this already been posted? I dunno. I did a search in the forums but didn't find anything. World Famous Design Junkies Extreme Graphic Design Plagiarism Reply With Quote   + Reply to Thread « Previous Thread | [...]

The Brun poster above is credited. It says “Brun” below the cat on the gig poster.

http://aimeewilder.com/pattern/ < third pattern from right on bottom row (original)

and

http://www.leannekerwin.co.uk/ < click TFL Moquette link

[...] make music that sounds easy to make. Sure, they might have borrowed a lot of their stuff, but who doesn’t. Chip-tunes stuff with nice samples and beats, it’s indie punk for the electronica [...]

[...] interesting article on plagiarism in design, here. [...]

everything is made of everything, that’s the time we are living…

Hi

excellent article, but there is a small error,

the russian space stamp is actually a Hungarian stamp

thanks
Zsolt Sandor

[...] Here’s an article at World Famous Design about copying and intellectual commons and etc. I find this discussion interesting at this particular junction in my life because I often worry as I prepare my portfolio that I am somehow in capable of producing an original and creative image. I’m a pretty ravenous consumer of visual culture, and I really worry that that fact, in conjunction with my insecurities as a young artist, make me really susceptible to copying other people’s trademark aesthetic–even if it’s totally void of malice, a sort of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” sort of thing. Granted, some of the works shown at World Famous Design are more visual reference (I think) than actual copyright infringement, though I suppose visual reference, by definition, is copyright infringement. [...]

分享 http://tinyurl.com/244x5ej (澄果事件？) 其實這樣的事倒是屢見不鮮─ http://tinyurl.com/y8ny7ha (Extreme Graphic Design Plag… http://plurk.com/p/564919

WOW! I suppose being aware of when/if we cross the line from emulation or admiration into blatant plagiarism is elemental to finding one own’s style. Throughout history, the apprentice copied the masters as lessons but this is inexcusable.

What this article shows, is the ease of digital theft. People that mede the above blantant copies lack their own ideas, so they have to steal, it’s as simple as that. I do make copies myslef – I hand-print t-shirts, and aside my own ideas, I do use other people art (sometimes without any changes), but I always stress that the original artwork and idea is not mine. I’d be very ashamed claiming somebodyelse’s art as mine – now, think about art school student’s that copy other artists’ works and make it their graduate works —-> see http://www.youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com

This is why I don’t take most gig poster designers very seriously. On gigposters we get so excited to see a great new poster, and people comment about how great it is. Like Lure (plagerism) designs out of Orlando. We all thought this Against me poster was fantastic and so cool. The artist sat by and said nothing, to clarify that he completely ripped off the idea and it was not his. http://www.gigposters.com/comments/125639_Against_Me!.html

This goes to show you that the only gig posters we can trust to not be complete rip offs are the ones where the illustration was completely hand drawn.

I realize that gigposters are low brow, but completely ripping off artists as a rampant constant process by many, and just sitting back and just taking all the compliments is pretty screwed up.

agreed