A Clouded Past I – Intellectual Property

Our task list this week focused primarily on Intellectual Property and I think it is a perfect place to start on my own inquiry into Photoshop (from Adobe). See, over the years I haven’t been so diligent about selectively sourcing any image I might need to complete a digital work. Fortunately I haven’t made many transgressions (short of a prolific career making colouring page mashups for my kids), and I have never sold any work that I have copied (did you know about. But, these few days of research have made me realize that a few of the images I have made over the years are not mine after all (including the featured image for this post)! I’ll share a few samples below to give you a better idea.

You could also read a more intriguing story of Shepard Fairey’s trouble with HOPE (NYT – ArtBeat Blog).

The first story I want to share is from early days, likely 2006. I picked up this album (below), The Chinese Cheng, from the old second-hand shop in Yung-Kang District in Taipei because I loved the artwork. Turned out I really liked the music of the “ancient” cheng, too! Check out a performance of the classic “Spring River Flower Moon Night” 古筝 – 春江花月夜 here (youTube user: Sounds of China Guzheng). I can close my eyes and picture a plum rain in late afternoon in Spring, hot and humid, ducking under cover to marvel at where all the rain can come from as it cascades through palm leaves and coils down their trunks.

So, early days, I was learning to use PS brushes and using the mouse to draw (painful days with a kinked wrist) and I wanted to make my own, more sinister, version of the album cover so I took a photo and imported it. Using it as a background I traced the figure as a separate layer and then created a sublayer>bucket fill>black and ended up with the featured image above. (I added the name chop for the first time on this piece and have ended up adding it to every creation I have made since. It is my digital watermark or signature – 木龍 – Wood Dragon, just weird enough to be somewhat unique to me.)

I remain proud of the image I made because I think it looks cool, but it sits on my hard drive and will stay there.

The album cover where I found the artwork for the featured piece above.

The Skull n Crossguns image (below) is another lesson in copyright that I haven’t understood until getting a clear message this week. The essential image was a part of a brush pack that I received on a CD of resources I got from somewhere and it was full of images of skulls, gas masks, biohazard symbols, and such.

To create this image I began with a white background and then grew the brush as big as possible before “stamping” it on the middle of a new blank layer. Then I dropped its opacity and traced its outline with a black standard brush on a new layer. I added a “2” stamp on its forehead to represent my film production company, Cabin 2. More on that here.

A lesson in PS brushes and copyright.

I had always assumed that these brushes were free to use so whatever derivative I made stemming from them was mine. I haven’t used this image much, but I have created some stickers that I stuck on my old motorcycle and a myriad of water bottles and journals. But, after this week’s reading, I have a new understanding that is best summed up by: if you didn’t create it from scratch it isn’t yours. Lesson learned.

But hey, now is the time! Learning more about intellectual property before I kick off a teaching career is going to be crucial in selecting what kinds of images and work I can use in my classroom and for my students. There is a lot to cover, but we may as well go back to the start and let the pieces fall in place as we move through this inquiry.