This quarter I am happily taking a class entitled Law and the Arts.
Or is it Law of the Arts.
Erroneous.
The class is wonderful except for the tiny unfortunate detail that it sometimes meets on Saturday beginning at 9am. Regardless of the meeting time, our first session was held this past Saturday which is how I came to learn of my past repeated infractions of copyright legislation.
Throughout my undergraduate college career I repeatedly came into contact with the concept of utilizing another artist's images within my own artwork. Most of the time I was doing this because it was something that was required for an assignment. Example: The Destroying the Icon assignment which is given to anyone who might have Ed Midget for Digital Imaging.
The idea behind this particular assignment was to pick a well known and recognizable image and alter it in Photoshop to the point that it is less recognizable in order to make it your own. The magic number that proved that the image had been sufficiently altered was 20%. Always 20%. Why 20%? I had no clue. I just did what I was told.
Digital Imaging was not the only place that this magic number came into my life. There was a certain Andy Warhol exhibit that I worked on, as well as at least one painting class that I took that also included the use of the magical 20%.
Well it was to my utter disbelief last Saturday that I was made aware that the whole 'exemption from copyright infringement by altering an image by 20%' thing is completely false and made up. My professor, a practicing Washington state lawyer, blew 20% right out of the water. He said that he too had heard the 20% rule throughout his scholastic career only to later in life, while practicing law, discover it to be wrong.
I was in such disbelief that I even raised my hand and asked him to restate and even clarify this craziness that he spoke of. He said that he knew that it was hard to believe and even posed the question, "How would you determine what constitutes 20% anyway?"
This was something I had never considered. Had I imagined that there was some sort of certified checklist within the big book of Artistic Image Theft? I had never considered how one might determine the 20% change. I had just always waited for Ed to tell me that my Elvis didn't look too much like Elvis anymore.
Now none of this really matters to me, as I have never sold any of my artwork, and really only utilized another person's imagery for that one particular project and maybe one other that I am pretty sure just found its way to the trash BUT this was something that had been told to me by professors and art professionals that had in turn been told to them as a way to bypass copyright laws. That is such a problem.
I am now hellbent on spreading the word. The word of copyright infringement and the lies of 20%.
