YTWWN SAYS: Im letting this post go up as a ‘what not to do’ the case here is that they have both sourced the same image or both ripped of the same photographer. Also note there is no such thing as ‘google stock image’
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A logo i made for our band ‘Tribal Vibe’ www.tribalvibe.com It has now been stolen and used as a Rage Against The Machine T-Shirt. Apparently for their most recent gig too.
i was looking through the NME magazine and saw the tshirt wiht our DVD cover. imagine my surprise!!!
The original photo comes from google stock image and was edited in a specific way to make the DVD cover.
Here is the Original Design from Tribal Vibe with the rip off tshirt design added in the bottom corner.

here is the link to the original tribal vibe Cover. it shows the date the image was uploaded
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3537061&id=506953970
and there is the link to the RATM TShirt
http://www.backstreet-merch.com/stores/nme/product.asp?item=ratm90

Posted in film, music on March 24th, 2010 16 Comments »
I could not believe the absolute identical score on this documentary to the superb Hans Zimmer score from Gladiator.
I was sure it would have a credit given to Hans Zimmer or Gladiator, but no, just one Martyn Swain.
The documentary (from 2002) start for just one of the many, many examples (auto starting at 25 seconds in)
BBC Documentary opening music
And now track 3, The Battle from the movie Gladiator (2000) (auto starting at 5 mins 52secs in for the same portion)
Gladiator Soundtrack – The Battle
This is just one example, it uses the Gladiator soundtrack music all the way through it, it’s a disgrace.
How does someone get away with this? Especially as the Gladiator soundtrack is SO well known… I only own two soundtracks, and that’s one of them!
Posted in design, music on March 24th, 2010 10 Comments »

One of our customers emailed us at work to say that some people were using our artwork for the Save BBC 6 Music campaign…turns out that @janeandjoe (http://twitter.com/janeandjoe) are taking credit for creating the below artwork!
Ripped off from our original artwork above which was created a couple of years ago by the wonderful Steve Kitchen of Combination13 (www.combination13.com)
Sad times…loads of people are commenting on Facebook saying about how “awesome” it is…and how “awesome” it would look on a t-shirt! http://twitpic.com/photos/awesomemerch it already does look good on t-shirts…on ours!
Bit frustrating as some of us at work listen to Six Music so we’re not “against” the cause…but it’s pretty bad form to rip off our artwork…which has now become the “official” flag of the Awesome Nation of Six Music on Lauren Laverne’s blog here
Oooh…Janeandjoe have just “disappeared” from twitter! Mid-post update.
Feel a bit silly ranting…but we’re a small company and we work really really hard and it’s bad form that the artwork’s been ripped off and they’re not even crediting Combination13 or us for “inspiration” even!

Love how everyone’s using the word “awesome” in relation to it as well! It is awesome….Awesome Merchandise!!
Vera Brosgol, an illustrator and story artist on such films as Coraline, has apparently been copied by Hot Topic or Pierce the Veil, or both. I suppose when they were going over this with their tracing paper and crayons, they thought that making it more homophobe-friendly and all-around way lamer might place it outside the realm of copyright infringement. Shameful on so many levels.
Vera’s original image:

[link to original]
The copy:


[link]
This news came from a post on Vera Brosgol’s own twitter feed at http://twitter.com/verabee.
Update: It seems this might go under speediest resolution ever. Vera contacted Hot Topic today and was already told that they will pull the shirt from their site and stores starting tomorrow (via twitter). This could possibly be the work of a dishonest designer, but who knows. I hope they will also stop all orders of the shirt that may have already been placed. Though perhaps they can send one to Vera as a souvenir?
Posted in art, music, video game on February 9th, 2010 11 Comments »
Irony comes in some interesting forms. For years I have been preaching about big companies blatantly ripping off lesser known artists. Despite this, sometimes the little guy can be just as much a plagiarist. I was walking into one of my favorite record stores today when I saw a giant poster advertising this:

Which reminded me a lot of one of my favorite video games:

Don’t get me wrong, EA is no saint. In the past the game company has had several lawsuits filed against it for questionable business practices and has even gone as far as erasing parts of their own Wikipedia entry to cover their questionable ethics. However art theft is art theft, especially theft as blatant as this. Lets have a closer look shall we?

Photo Left URL: http://www.gamespot.com/users/xHiTmAnxi/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25734820 (Center Picture on page)
Photo Right URL: http://www.myspace.com/dmwcd (top banner on page)
The “S” really gives it away. Whoever copied this didn’t even bother hiding where the “S” was cut off by the Need for Speed text.
Here is the link to their main site and myspace:
http://www.denversmostwanted.org/
http://www.myspace.com/dmwcd
Go nuts.
Posted in art, music on January 17th, 2010 14 Comments »
I wasn’t going to put this on here as it’s a smaller scale than most of the other stuff but I thought some of you may find it amusing. The top is the original poster that I was commissioned to do by Empirical Booking (www.myspace.com/empiricalbooking), from Minneapolis. They put on an all dayer of metal, punk and hardcore.

A few months later the guys at Empirical Booking emailed me with a link to this….

It looks like someone liked my original poster so much that they took my name off it, changed all the bands on it, filled it with dodgy fonts, added a little touch of red and even stole the name (Slasherfest) for their own…er, fest. I guess it’d be quite hard to prove its mine… apart from the fact that the guy getting his throat slit is me!!!
If you’re bored/still have myspace follow this link… www.myspace.com/teejayspromotings … maybe tell them you prefer the original (unless you dont that is).
If you want to check out more of my stuff I’m on flickr and myspace…
www.myspace.com/iainsellar
www.flickr.com/iainsellar
Thanks
Iain
Posted in art, design, music on November 28th, 2009 19 Comments »
I made a gigposter for Of Montreal last year, and a month or so ago posted a smaller art print (8″ x 10″) version of the work on my flickr page.

A fellow poster maker spotted the image online, apparently promoting a Texas music festival called Connect the Dots. They just slapped some text on it and turned it into a flier.

Ugh. I have sent messages to all the bands and the festival (all of them have it as their myspace profile pic) in hopes that they will take it down and stop actin’ a fool.
Posted in art, film, music, photography on November 28th, 2009 9 Comments »
first the video:
Charlotte Gainsbourg feat. Beck – Heaven Can Wait
now the images from William Hundley’s Flickr:

now Hundley’s Flickr post after i emailed him the link to the video:

not only did Keith Schofield rip Hundley, but the whole video is rips of other works from fffound.com. Who needs to come up with new ideas when you can just use flickr or fffound?

Posted in advertisign, design, music on October 27th, 2009 15 Comments »
YTWWN SAYS: As noted in the comments this isn’t a rip to get your knickers in a knot, but more of a ‘oh.. that’s where you got that from’. No biggie..
This rip is actually kind of smart, considering a very small percent of the audience seeing the ripped poster would know it’s origin–alas, I do. Geigy Pharmaceutical was a Swiss based company with a slew of excellent designers contributing to their visual presence. A book was just published on the in-house design studio J. R. Geigy AG, called Corporate Diversity: Swiss Graphic Design and Advertising by Geigy, 1940 – 1970, by Lars-Muller Publishing.
The rip comes from poster studio, The Small Stakes. Tisk-tisk Jason Munn.
The Original: New Persantin brochure designed by Fred Troller, offset printing:

Poster by Jason Munn for the band, Bon Iver:

Posted in music on October 10th, 2009 11 Comments »

It was recently pointed out that one of my favorite songs by the 80’s New Wave flamboyant band Split Enz, ‘Six Months in a Leaky Boat’ was directly sampled and copied by Cut Copy. No pun intended.
Cut Copy’s ‘Feel the Love’, has the same riff. The exact ‘riff battle’ that got Men At Work into trouble for using the flute riff from the children’s tune ‘Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gumtree’.
How does Cut Copy just ‘cut the crap copy’, get away with producing hipster music mimicking the 80’s electro style, to appease the mind-less fashionisters of the 2009. Is this what we call copyright infringement in music!
Cut Copy, \’Feel the Love\’
Split Enz, \’Six Months In A Leaky Boat\’