Reference vs. Theft
I got started on a personal illustration project on Sunday morning. Said illustration includes a mountie hat.
The problem: I don’t actually know what a mountie hat looks like.
I mean, I had a good idea off the top of my head — brown with a flat wide brim, some kind of strip around the bottom of a lumpy bowl. However, to keep things accurate, I went and found some reference.
Josh brought up the question of whether this was stealing someone else’s work or not.
It’s a good question. Here’s my take on it, and I’d love to hear other ideas on the subject.
To me, using visual reference — especially from the bottomless pit that is the internet — is a fact-finding mission only. In the case of this mountie hat, I used the above link to see what the hats generally look like: to see what kind of brown they are, how proportionally wide the brim is, what kind of trim they have, and what kind of shape the upper bowl is.
I did not copy any of these hats. I did not copy parts of these hats and assemble them into a whole hat. In the end, I wound up with a hat that looks like a mountie hat, based on the information I garnered from those other hats.
I would never straight out copy someone else’s work, whatever the medium. But what about general info — size, color, where a buckle appears, etc. — is that stepping over the line? What do you think?
March 8th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
I’m no lawyer. Here’s how I understand it:
If you traced the illustration, there could be some question. But if you looked at and even measured photos of hats and then created entirely original illustrations, then you are in the clear.
Perhaps the critical part is that there are so many photos of Mountie hats, you might have copied any one of them, so no photographer could prove that you’d copied her or his photo.
But in any case, you are always free to illustrate what you see, so since you did not copy nor trace, you have nothing to fear.
Just my own non-lawyer understanding of the case.
March 10th, 2010 at 9:02 pm
That is my take, too. Thanks for weighing in!