Posts Tagged ‘concept copying’

Community corrosive

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

Community. This is what crowdSPRING is truly about. We are a community that celebrates creativity, possibility, and fair competition. We are built to support our users and provide them with professional opportunity and value. Of course community is a delicate thing – even a strong community, built on common interests, support, and mutual respect, can be fragile and easily damaged. Bad behavior by its members can have a corrosive effect and, ultimately, degrade the quality and value that the community provides.

One of the ways in which we have built strong community is by providing industry-leading features and policies for protecting the intellectual property of our users. We also take pride in providing great customer service, which includes replying promptly to reports of IP violations and settling disputes fairly. Last fall we started providing educational materials to Creatives via the Tips tab. In January, our community contributed to this effort, when we collaboratively developed and adopted a Standards of Conduct for Creatives working on crowdSPRING, to codify behaviors that are not acceptable when participating on the site.

But, in spite of these efforts, since this past January we have seen a steady increase in reported IP violations. These reports include the unauthorized use of stock art, inclusion of offensive material, outright plagiarism, and (possibly the worst of all) the copying of submitted concepts. Too often we are receiving reports that one Creative has “stolen” the concept first submitted by another. Many of you have been victim to this harmful practice, and some of you are guilty of engaging in it. Since launch we have tracked this trend and we are considering ways we can reduce the number of incidents. Take a look at the charts below showing IP violations data for January through July. The first one shows the steep increase in the raw number of IP Violation reports since the beginning of the year. The trend is disturbing, yes, but considering that we have also grown dramatically since January in terms of projects and participating Creatives, perhaps not as bad as it appears at first glance:

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Posted in Awesomeness, community, crowdsourcing, design, Site Updates | 9 Comments »

How Does crowdSPRING Protect Intellectual Property?

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

UPDATED: March 17, 2010.

crowdSPRING respects intellectual property – this is one of our core values as a company (before co-founding crowdSPRING, I spent 13 years as an attorney focusing on the protection of intellectual property, for clients around the world). People often ask what crowdSPRING does to protect intellectual property. The Q&A below shares our answers to the most common questions.

1. Does crowdSPRING have specific policies to protect people’s intellectual property rights?

Answer: Yes. crowdSPRING has two specific, written policies designed to protect intellectual property. First, crowdSPRING’s  Copyright Policy makes it easy for copyright owners to report alleged violations of their intellectual property rights. Second, crowdSPRING’s User Agreement prohibits people from selling, reproducing, modifying, displaying, preparing derivative works from, reposting, or using the content found on crowdspring.com – without the express written permission from the owner of the work.

2. What does crowdSPRING do to prevent people’s intellectual property from being stolen?

Answer: The International Chamber of Commerce estimates that the global fiscal loss due to theft of intellectual property is over $600 billion USD per year. Stealing someone else’s intellectual property is a crime in just about every single country on Earth.  However, it is impossible to prevent people from stealing intellectual property (whether the theft occurs online or offline).

Just because it is generally impossible to prevent theft doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t make reasonable efforts to protect intellectual property. Here’s what we do at crowdSPRING:

  • We’ve developed and published detailed, comprehensive written policies concerning intellectual property (as you saw in the answer to question 1 above).
  • We’ve adopted strict policies and practices governing IP disclosures.
  • We’ve developed and published detailed, comprehensive written standards of conduct for creatives (see Q&A 4 below).
  • We’ve developed rules and procedures recognizing the importance of original ideas in projects so as to protect original ideas and prevent concept copying (see Q&A 14 below).
  • We make it very easy to report possible violations of intellectual property (see Q&A 5 below).
  • We work together with our entire community – nearly 55,000 designers strong across the world (our designers come from over 170 countries) to identify possible violations of intellectual property.
  • When a creative withdraws their entry, it is screened completely so that no part of it is shown. The word “withdrawn” is instead shown to buyers and other users.
  • We permanently bar people from crowdspring.com for violating others’ intellectual property rights (see Q&A 7-10 below).
  • We enforce the licensing restrictions of third parties (see for example, Q&A 13 which deals with stock images).
  • After a project is completed, we screen with a gray filter all except the winning entries for that project to make it very difficult to review any details associated with non-winning designs.

We have a number of other systems in place that we keep confidential, that help us to protect our community from the theft of intellectual property, and we continue to look for other technological and non-technological ways we can improve our efforts in this area. If you have suggestions, we’d love to hear in the comments to this post.

3. How does crowdSPRING inform its community about crowdSPRING’s intellectual property policies?

Answer: Every time a creative submits a design to a project, they are required to pick one of three statements about their design:

  • I created everything in my entry and I didn’t copy anyone else’s concept.
  • This design includes photos, illustrations or fonts created by others but I have the right to both use and resell.
  • This design includes photos, illustrations or fonts created by others and if the buyer picks it, they’ll have to buy the rights.

A creative cannot participate in a project unless they select one of those three statements. We also publish links to our policies on the participation pages, and in a creative tip’s page visible to everyone in every project.

In logo design projects, we specifically require that designers represent that their logos do not contain any form of stock art. You can read more about our strict stock art policy.

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Posted in business, community, crowdsourcing, design, Strategy | 22 Comments »

1 Percent Inspiration, 99 Percent Perspiration

Monday, August 11th, 2008

“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” - Thomas Edison.

It’s one thing for artists to be inspired by the work of others. It’s quite another to simply borrow without permission or compensation, what someone else has worked hard to create.

Last week, Mike posted an article about Girl Talk – the stage name of Greg Gillis who performs musical mashups incorporating work from other artists. Mike’s post asked three questions:

1. Does Girl Talk’s work constitute theft of intellectual property?

2. Is it unethical for him to incorporate other artists’ work into his own?

3. Should he be sued for copyright infringement?

Mike’s opinion – NO to all three questions. I am not so sure, particularly since I think the first two questions are incomplete. Here is what I’d ask:

1. Does Girl Talk’s work constitute theft of intellectual property if permission of original artists was never obtained and the original artists are not compensated?

2. Is it unethical for Girl Talk to incorporate other artist’s work into his own without permission or compensation to those original artists?

3. Should Girl Talk be sued for copyright infringement?

In my opinion, the answer to the first two questions is YES. As for the third question – that’s for the original artists or their labels to decide. There is much unsettled law in this area and it’s not as clear-cut as it appears initially. But I would urge the owners of the original works (or their agents) to act if they find Girl Talk’s practice objectionable.

Girl Talk certainly has a very distinctive style and is willing to experiment, both musically and financially. After all, as we wrote in another post, Girl Talk followed Radiohead in offering a version of the pay-what-you want pricing model. But I question whether it’s proper for an artist to simply take from other artists’ work without permission and compensation.

In music, “sampling” involves the taking of a portion of a sound recording and reusing it in a new recording. One example: the guitar riffs from Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” in Tone-Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina”

Let’s briefly look at two concepts in copyright law: derivative works and fair use. When a work is based on one or more preexisting works, it’s commonly known as a “derivative work”. U.S. Copyright law (and the laws of many countries) typically give the creators of original works a limited monopoly to create works based on or derived from the original works. This is done to encourage artists and authors to produce original works.

The second concept is called “fair use”. Fair use was intended to permit the use of parts of a creative work for criticism, commentary and reporting (these are the goals of U.S. copyright law – these goals might differ in other countries). Courts consider a number of factors in determining whether a use is “fair use”, but that’s a separate discussion. Fair use is not a universal doctrine.

When musicians sample a recording, they typically need to obtain the permission from the owner of the recording. Many musicians obtain prior permission (and pay up-front fees or royalties based on sales). There are a number of companies that act as sample clearance services and will help musicians obtain all rights involved with a sample.

Many musicians comply with copyright rules. Even younger bands – such as The Dufrenes, who will release their first album in the fall – make sure that when they sample other people’s work, they obtain a license (and pay the required royalties).

I respectfully disagree with Mike that it would be proper for a graphic designer to incorporate an image someone else created into a larger piece, presumably without permission or compensation. Perhaps Rodin’s the thinker is a poor example given its rather dated history, but take any contemporary image and I think most creatives would find such incorporation to be inappropriate. I could certainly invoke a feeling or make a statement if I create a new company selling computers with a combination of logo elements from some of the top computer companies (such as Apple, DELL, etc.). But I hardly think that would be proper and I bet Apple, DELL and their legal counsel will have something to say if I did that.

What do you think? How do you answer the three questions?

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, inspiration, marketing | 3 Comments »

Not-So-Creative Design: EcoGeek vs. Intel

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

A while ago, Ross began an interesting primer on Concept Copying, an issue which often comes up in the design world (Look for him to finish up Part 3 shortly).

Regardless of whether creatives are graphic designers, musicians, or filmmakers, they all draw inspiration from other works. Take a band like British rock act Oasis, who’ve sold over 18 million copies of their sophomore release, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory. They are a hugely successful modern rock act with multiple hit singles. If you listen to a song like “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” there’s no denying that The Beatles were a huge influence on Oasis. The same statement goes for The Beatles, whose early music is heavily influenced by Chuck Berry, and so forth.

However, drawing inspiration from other creatives is very different than blatantly stealing their work.

The Twitter-verse went crazy yesterday as news circulated that microprocessor giant Intel stole from the blogosphere. They yanked environmental-friendly tech blog EcoGeek‘s logo design to use in several slides for their Centrino processor launch.


(EcoGeek’s logo, designed by Peter Holm)


(EcoGeek’s logo, as used by Intel PR)

According to EcoGeek, Intel also released the slides to the public with full sharing rights. It will be interesting to see how the company’s lawyers handle the situation. Looks like somebody in their PR department is in big trouble!

(Click here for the original post, including many interesting comments.)

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Posted in business, design, marketing | 2 Comments »

Concept Copying – A Primer (Part 2 of 3)

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

In part 1 of our discussion about concept copying, we defined concept copying, and illustrated an example, from an Apple patent application.

Concept copying is a very important subject in the design community – both for professionals and non-professionals. After all, while it’s commonly accepted that all design is inspired by other design, mere copying is NOT inspiration. But it also should be said that not everything we create is unique. We are influenced by our culture, our history, and our environment. But there is a very clear difference between inspiration and influence, and outright stealing.

Let’s continue our discussion by looking at an example – the logo design for askville, a question and answer service from Amazon that was launched to compete with, among others, Google Answers.

Long before Amazon published the above design, another company, eventful (an events website), had already been publicly using, for some time, the following logotype:

Did the designer who created the askville logotype simply copy the eventful logotype? After all, both use arial rounded fonts, both use lowercase type, both use two identical colors, and both switch colors for each morpheme. [NOTE: the original logo for askville had the term "ask" in blue and "ville" in green].

There are differences – the eventful logotype uses more compact letter spacing and a brighter blue, as well as a darker green color. There is also Amazon’s branding on the askville logotype. Are those differences meaningful?

Could we agree on ANY of the following?

  • that the eventful logotype is the first ever to have each morpheme be a separate color
  • that the eventful logotype uses an original font.
  • that the eventful logotype is the first ever to use all lowercase type
  • that the eventful logotype is the first ever to use green and blue colors
  • that the eventful logotype is the first ever to switch colors for each morpheme

I believe that two people couldn’t agree on any of those things, because the eventful logo was NOT the first design ever to have those elements. And it’s perfectly plausible (but not very likely) that the designer of the askville logo had never seen the eventful logo.

What do you think? Is this a clear example of concept copying? Or does this example underscore the real complexity of concept copying?

More on this issue, and some suggestions, in part 3 (early next week).

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Posted in business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, start-up tips | 5 Comments »