Artists Using Doll Likenesses without Crediting [Mijn Schatje discussion]

Well, she won't be getting away with it any more xD I linked her to the Netdiver thing over facebook. I hope she starts realizing she's got to come clean.

 

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but I do think they credit should be given where credit is due.

 

Agnes-Agatha, if someone took a photo of your art and traced it over without permission and sold it for $1k, would you be perfectly happy?

 

Oh don't worry, Volks has been emailed all of that.

 

Also: Beware of clicking anything in or around those Infectious.com links that some people are providing here in this thread. I did this morning, & now that computer has shat the bed completely. The virus is a trojan called 'sysguard.exe' and it's one of those viruses that masquerades as an antivirus program (throws popups to try to panic you into clicking Yes to everything). Nothing good can come of those pirate-flavored art sites, & this foul karmic joke just nailed it home for me. Hope that lowdown no-account tracemeister Mijn gets rotten tomatoes thrown at the entire catalogue of her gallery show.

 

Yes definitely!
What makes me sadden about this case is that where are the creditings to the companies and the owner of the photos??
I see now she has asked for some permission but I have seen no crediting for them oAo

But some of Mijn's artwork is an exact overlay of company photographs... When it is exactly, how can you justify it was just inspired?

 

Me too....same one Jenny...stoopid thing comes in and looks like one of your own antivirus pop ups and then ...BAM...and you cannot get rid of it.
I had my guy working on it all day...one simple click cost me boo coo bucks today.

BEWARE yall.

 

Bunnydots nailed it for me.

 

Yes, thank you. I know when I was discussing the issue before, it was in a general way "should artists depict bjds in their artwork w/o crediting the company" which is different than someone actually tracing over other people's images and coming right out and claiming the character design as their own. This particular artist has gone way above and beyond what a lot of us were talking about to begin with. While I don't think artists need to credit the company every time they paint a bjd, it's not ok to do what this individual artist is doing--she definitely crossed the line.

 

Normally when people steal, "Who gives a crap?" is not considered the moral response, Spring. That's why we have the law and police. You know, so transgressions are discouraged and preferably remedied. Recall when all the Volks dolls were stolen? They were also Volks property, just like these photos. We still tried to get them back and find out who had done such a shameful thing.

Also, lawyers are not genies who appear as soon as there is a legal issue. People, such as the doll companies, must be aware that there is a problem before they can be expected to attend to it. That is why people are, by your standards, "wasting" energy to categorize instances of this problem.

 

So you prefer she keep getting away with it? Isn't it about the public involvement which brings attention to such issues to people with more authority?
How could lawyers of been informed if the companies themselves did not know about it in the first place?

 

To be fair, I acknowledge that Mijn Schatje added her own elements to create the artwork. That doesn't hide the fact that she traced photos of sculptures by somebody else, and even allowed a sculpture to be made of her work, featuring a face she stole. It's an absolute slap in the face to those doll creators she supposedly respects so much.

I can't believe she is ok with saying(not quoted word for word of course) "Yes, I own this work, I have never seen BJDs that look like what I have drawn."

I don't know what you mean by cartoonish pictures, Agnes, because company photos are not cartoons. Maybe you think it's ok to copy and steal from other works. If it's so okay with you, why do you think she isn't just outright admitting it?

It's not like she doesn't have the skills to make beautiful artwork. It's just quite aggravating that she chooses this ugly path(oh vector pun lol).

Supposing I take it she was just inspired. Inspired by the exact photograph angles? Inspired by the exact facial copy? Geez, even inspired by eye placement mistakes?
Where would she be then, without the original photographs?

Even other artists who draw lots of big eyed girls don't trace over exactly.

I wouldn't care so much if she took pictures of her own dolls, to be honest. But now she's just rabidly thieving and profiting off others' efforts. It's so sickening to think that some people consider everything as stock photographs.

 

God ！This is thief's behavior

 

Well while the rest of you were (understandbly) fixated on the faces, I have also been looking at the rest of the works in question. I have been an unwitting accomplice to art theft (the Italian "artist" who "did" the cover of one of my Italian editions copy-pasted several pieces from Rowena's work) and since my husband is a professional artist, I am not so bad at recognizing *ahem* "borrowed" images.

I would venture to say that EXCLUDING the stolen faces, only 25% at most of the rest of the image is original.

Most of the other items in these images are clip-art, scanned images from other things such as boomboxes and rubics cubes, and pieces purloined from '50s popular advertising art. In fact, in several of her "works" the only thing that is original to it is the composition itself and I can't actually vouch for that. Her style is that of 1950s ad-art, and there are millions of images of that sort of thing about; she could even have been taking the actual compositions.

Now if she called herself a "digital collage artist," I could respect that. But trying to pawn this cut-and-paste stuff as her own? Gag me.

 

And here I didn't even wanna know how much of the rest was taken.
I was assuming but didn't have much more then that so was staying silent there but.
Man oh man. Gag me indeed.

The problem with the rest is it's so damned easy to go out and buy a boombox or a rubics cube and take your own picture that she could actually own the image used there. huff

 

I think it's better not to say anything else unless you have visual proof.. otherwise she could probably discredit us by saying we jump on everything based only on assumptions.

edit: *by 'anything else' i mean suggesting other parts of the image are stolen too.

 

I have e-mailed my local paper about this obvious art theft...and as soon as I can find a newstips address for the New York Times, I'll e-mail the information to them, as well.

Making this kind of money off of blatant tracing, and then denying it...She's in the same class as people who talk at the theater. >_> /fireflyreference

 

It is possible that she is telling the truth and that she has just ended up with the exact same angles and so on without using those exact photos.

BUT

Lets break this down (poor maths style! Feel free to correct my numbers/add more! I am not a mathematician, just trying to work out the probabilities for myself...)

Ok, 360 degrees in a full horizontal rotation of the face, but lets call it 180 because she doesn't use the back of the head. Same again for the position of the face vertically. So far that gives us ... 32400 potential head positions?

Ok, then we add in the eyes, much more limited movement but lets say there's at least ten positions for eyes, so we're on 324000 potential photos now.

So, in my amateur calculations on head and eye position alone there's a 1 in 324000 chance of a photo she's drawing from being exactly the same as someone elses naturally. You then have to consider the fact that it's happened 22 times as well, so we have to work out the proabilility that all 200 photos were identical by chance alone...

Maths kills my brian.

 

....I'd have to agree with the general feeling that this is theft of intellectual property.

As someone in the academic world of Art and Design, I know that if I or one of my classmates did something similar, and did not credit/cite the original source, we would be unconditionally expelled from the University and have a permanent black mark on our academic reputation. It's plagerism.

Also, I'm reminded of the case with Koons and his sculpture with the blue puppies ^^;;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_v._Koons
It's a case where the original photographer sues an artist who has made an art piece from his photograph.

 

Well... she's certainly had a rather large profile boost. I was reading stuff about this on non-doll-people's blogs this morning. If anything... Mijn Shatje may suffer irreperable damage to her reputation. Which may as well be the end of her career.