Another reason C&D sucks

http://jalopnik.com/5527126/how-car-...e-artists-work

 

hahaha owned!!

 

I know it's tempting for an artist to use works they find on the Internet, but piracy is simply wrong. Besides, as easy as it is to find an image, it's equally easy to find one of your own works plagiarized. It takes a fair amount of effort to get permissions and sometimes it's just impossible. I have a buy-out set of CD's that provide something like a half-million images, and all but a handful are worthless. In order to protect my clients, I usually get one of our artist/animators to whip up the requisite graphics. Yes, it's expensive, but much less so than a lawsuit.

 

We have much the same issue here at my office. Most stock photo CD's are worthless, save for 2 or 3 images. We subscribe to some reputable stock photo sites, but even then, finding an image you need can take hours of searching.

Our bigger problem though, isn't us sourcing other peoples works. It's clients who think they can use any image the find out on the internet for production ready art. We actually had one client who did this (without our knowledge BTW) and the image owner ran across it just by chance. They threatened legal action if the images use wasn't stopped immediately. Cost our client a pretty penny, as the originator wouldn't lease rights to the photo, and it was a key element to a very expensive marketing campaign.

 

Jonisbal is super talented at photo-shopping/rendering!

He's all over the BMW forums with images of what he envisions the upcoming models to look like. It's a shame that a company like C&D would exploit his talent in this way.

 

That's a good point! Often I'm given images by a client who simply picked them up from the Internet, or even from their own agency's photographer. The problem is that nowadays most photographers don't "sell" their works, but "lease" them for specific applications. Put one of their photos licensed for a year's ad campaign into a video, and unless there is specific permission (and payment) for such applications, there's going to be trouble.

At one time, corporate video was a rather limited market - hardly anyone outside the company or its customers' purchasing people ever saw them. With several exceptions, the average corporate video we produced was only released in a few hundred copies, at most a thousand or two in a couple of years.

Today, with more of these works published on the web, these videos get much wider distribution. One of our videos published on our un-promoted YouTube channel has had well over 7,000 hits in the past year, while a couple of others are in the region of 2,000. Now these are mostly highly-targeted technical presentations, of little interest to the layman. For the risk of going viral, today we have to be extremely careful about licensing music, art, even voice-over performances to protect our clients.

You would think Car & Driver with it's enormous circulation and web presence would be smarter about those things.

 

C&D is pretty lucky. All they had to do was print an apology. I don't know if the original artist is a professional or not, but they got lucky there was no legal action involved.

 

I know. A lawyer would have jumped on this

 

Mark Neeper should know better as the paid artist. He drags the publishing company and the mag in with him by this bone head move. Then one also wonders how many other works he may have copied. This is one aspect that as an artist or photographer, registering ones work is important. C&D is lucky they weren't looking at an infringement lawsuit.

 

the letter they wrote to apologize had that please don't call a lawyer tone

 

Classic art is often used for illustration because it is in public domain. However, this can get ridiculous . . . with a little photoshop . . .

http://readingthepast.com/gallery/reusable-covers.htm Careful, although these illustrations are at least neoclassical, they may be viewed as NSFW.

 

I blame the auto makers themselves, not auto magazines or photographers/journalists.....and I have commented on this practice many times in the past. Each time a vehicle is introduced, redesigned or a major re-styling feature is added, the manufacturers play a cat-and-mouse game with the "spy-shot" people by using different bodies for testing, or by disguising the real prototype bodies with bras, tape, blackouts, etc.....until they are formally introduced at auto shows.

If the manufacturers would just GROW UP, stop acting childish, come clean once and for all, toss out all that idiotic bra/tape and coverings, and just not worry about it, C&D and other auto publications wouldn't HAVE to play a guessing-game with spy shots or by the cut-and-paste art methods mentioned in the article.

 

While I won't comment on the auto manufacturers desire for secrecy, the real issue at hand here is 'intellectual property'.

It is very common in the graphics field to do 'cut & paste' illustration/manipulations to create the desired image. It's also a very fine line between copying someone else's work, to manipulating it to the point where it is a completely new piece of art, and at what point royalties (or at least a photo credit) becomes unnecessary.

Had C&D just used the car to fill an empty space in a parking lot full of cars, and it was not the primary focus of the image, things might be different. But the original image is the main focus, with minimal manipulation (just flipped and re-colored).