I also gave you the benefit of weight in the issue when I closed Rhett's sales thread upon your request. BUT, again, you did not back up your part of the original pm's in verifying the legal threat to actually stop him selling the paintings. Had you, or had the original artist been in contact as requested via multiple pms back to you, it would have been shut down; it is the RPF policy is to shut down such sales upon such request. A situation as you noted we did do with Rhett's Omni cover sale. Thus again, your pm's and lack of follow through with the Vigo painting artist was in MY perspective empty and not valid.
I was more than willing to act upon your request had you followed through in any acceptable manner and we did follow through in keeping a critical eye towards any issue that might pop up with Rhett given the history noted earlier.
I am sorry that I do not recall the thread being shut down. I think only the OMNI cover was removed at that time. But to be clear, you would have liked to see legal action taken? Yet legal action is a bannable offense? I can't say I understand that policy. However I must extend that it was not my area to infer legal action, I was only passing along information. On my site we have only had something similar happen once. I work very closely with license and copyright holders for Ghostbusters, so I keep that all in balance.
However, stuff gotten off the web is for the most part a free-for-all.
I have never seen it that way, and that is one reason why I didn't take other people's images without permission when I was making my website in the late 90's.
As studio property seen on the screen, it was recreated from photographs and made available for sale as a replica.
However those photos were copyrighted by their photographer. And since they were photos of an owned and copyrighted object, it does not negate the ownership or allow reproductions to be made. For example.. if I take a photograph of a famous painting... I cannot go and sell copies of the photo just because I took the photo. We will all agree however that this is unbelievably grey because everything ANYONE does here is not legal and very difficult to argue.
For the record, I received no compensation of any kind for the role I played and have no idea whether anyone else did or not.
I'm not sure what role you did play. But Rhett has said that those who
worked on it received compensation from the profits that were made...
The original artist has no say in what happens to his work once he has sold it, and its copyright etc. Sorry, its true, technical or otherwise.
While this is normally true. You cannot make that assumption. It depends solely on the contract and purchasing agreement that was made with the artist. In many cases the original artist retains some rights. I'm sure however as a contracted employee there are some differences.
The original painting is not in tip-top condition.
Actually its in pretty close to the same condition it was in Ghostbusters 2. There were several paintings made for the film. If I will remind you weren't they working to restore the painting in the movie? It is weathered...
The person who, through his/her efforts, spends hours on end photoshopping it to 'restored condition', has every (big inverted commas) "right" to get (again big inverted commas) "annoyed" if someone takes his (big inverted commas) "work", and peddles it for cash.
I know this is more grey area. But what right does he have if he owns nothing? He didn't own the original image he was restoring. He didn't own the works with-in the image. To make a counter argument. How is this different than the original artist getting annoyed? If the original artist isn't allowed to be annoyed... how should the recaster be able to be?
And to make it clear.. The user he was annoyed at did not use the photoshopped image. Rhett was trying to intimidate that user into not doing the run.
Very grey.. but try to see both sides of it.
At this point, in my humble opinion, Rhett is on the very dark end of the Grey scale with Vigo, but was very much in the black on recasting.
I really like this interpretation. I know Art does not want to look at the Vigo part of this argument. However I think both should be taken into account.
ALSO. Do not forget about the OMNI Magazine. The OMNI magazine was owned by gjustis. He made a scan of it and sent it to a few friends asking not to send it to anyone. Inevitably it was traded on and Rhett got his hands on it. After having done the Vigo paintings his immediate thought was.
Hey.. I can retouch this and then sell it "at cost"! How is that not digital recasting? In fact.. it was.. his thread was deleted or he was asked to take it down.
I would look at it like this:
Vigo Painting - Grey
OMNI Magazine - Dark Grey
Recasting Parts from 2+ People - Black
I was unaware that any suspicion / evidence has been presented to prove that hotshot took a 'clean' image of Vigo made by someone else, & tweaked it a little to make a run of paintings.
The project took two images off of Flickr and composited them together. The image from Flickr was copyrighted.
Just a note to everyone on the whole Vigo painting thing, if you are hoping we are going to burn anyone on that count, it simply isn't going to happen. You can be angry and you can try to explain how this was used and that person was upset but at the end of the day, looking back at the thread where all this took place, this community supported it and no one had a problem with it back when it was taking place. There were a number of people involved and to try to go back and single out Hotshot as the lone gunman only serves to make his accusers appear to be grasping for straws.
I only hope that the Vigo painting and OMNI magazine are not discounted completely.