Screenshot images are from the blog of Rohan Anderson
Featured image is from a blog post by Kuro Hachi, whose blog is dedicated to proper crediting.
In a time where Googling is an actual word in the dictionary, it’s easy to forget that work always requires attribution. Common excuses are “I’ll just go back into my Internet history later,” or “Professor doesn’t even really check.” The fact is it’s an extra step to properly credit someone. It takes a couple of minutes, pressing on the keyboard and humility to let everyone know that a part of what you publish isn’t yours.
In the beginning of April, the popular band Red Jumpsuit Apparatus posted a photo on their Facebook and Instagram pages of them in concert with the simple caption “Shredder.” It was liked by thousands of people. It was a really good photo. However, it soon came to light the photo was posted without permission from or credit to the original photographer, freelancer Rohan Anderson. The watermark was cropped out, a filter was added and the quality was significantly reduced.
The Facebook Post
The Original Image by Rohan Anderson
As easy as it is to just find work by others to download, screenshot and reuse, it’s just as easy for the original artist to find you. It’s also not hard to spread the word and have others rally behind you. This is exactly what Anderson did. A detailed account of the experience is available on his personal website.
Anderson contacted the group’s management directly, asking them to “Please remove the image immediately or you are welcome to keep it up if a payment is discussed.” What ensued was a drawn-out back and forth including Facebook messages, emails and tweets with the hashtag #rohanisatool.
Eventually, the band tweeted “The situation has been resolved, to any of our fans please don’t antagonize this any further. Quite simply the world has bigger problems…” The irony is that the band later on tweeted the following:
The most upsetting part of this incident is that this isn’t the first—and it won’t be the last—time that an artist’s work is taken without proper crediting. At SCAD, a university where work relies on individual creativity, the issue of copyright is not tackled often enough. There are very strict rules and serious measures the school takes once a student is found out, but the bigger problem is not consequence; it’s prevention.
Truth be told, it’s not as simple as just taking photos, making your own textures and drawing your own icons. There are obvious issues of students’ resources, location and time. What can be done is increase awareness that proper credit should be given, then provide knowledge of how to do it correctly.
While it might be a few extra steps to give credit where it’s due, in the long run, it is beneficial to both parties. Use someone’s work well, and they might just share it with their audience. That’s double the shares, double the likes and and an exponential amount of page views.
Gabby Manotoc has been Creative Director for District for the past three years. She also designs the Port City Review, the student produced and curated annual literary arts journal of SCAD.
