Saturday 19 July 2014

Thinks That Make You Go Grr! - On Proper Attribution

A nodding acquaintance of mine - Gemma Correll - is an illustrator, specialising in gently amusing comments on life.  Given the number of times I see her work, I imagine she is quite successful - she certainly has a following.  Nevertheless, it's a precarious living (my nephew and several associates are just starting out).





This morning one of less funny her pieces was shared on Facebook by George Takei (which given that he has over 7 million followers is a big thing).  Sadly, the website he found the image on - let's name and shame funnyasduck.net - have edited the picture to remove Gemma's signiture and url, replacing it with their own (even using the same font and style!).  This is appalling: it is theft of intellectual property.

I know some of my readers who try to make a living out of painting have also had this problem.  Now I'm as guilty as any casualty blogger over this - I try to have a picture for every post I make, and I don't always give the source - but for a business to this is out of order.

Welcome

OK, after the little rant, a new follower welcome to Ian Drury.


Edit- 23 Jul 2014

Funny As Duck So this is why we got a bunch of e-mails, to clear it up If you look around the other comics on our site you will see we don't remove artists signatures and credit everybody we can.   If somebody else removes the signature before we see/get sent the comic there isn't anyway for us to tell unless we know the artists work, in this case we didn't. The watermark was an auto thing that we stopped using a long time ago. We have swapped over the image on our site to the original.

5 comments:

  1. I concur I am not a freelance artist now but I have been one in the past and this is really galling. She should put her signed signature in every image she draws that way her name can't be removed.

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  2. That's wrong, and very annoying.

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  3. Not good, not good at all, to deliberately try to disguise the ownership of the work is just awful.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, that's what I was trying to get at - it isn't just a case of not attributing something (we're all guilty of that), but of going to the effort to edit the picture to remove the attribution...

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  4. This must be made right. I'm just not sure how you go after the offender, funnyasduck.net.

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