MIT Steals Comic Book Character

Merle writes "According to Horizon Comics MIT has stolen images from their comic Radix in a proposal to the US Army as an attempt to gain funds to foot a project in creating a better, stronger type of soldier for tomorrow. Upon inspection of the images themselves, it can be easily seen that minor image alteration and a bit of photoshop magic for the background, MIT did a classic comic book "swipe" and took the credit for it." Well, imitation/flattery/blah blah blah, but man. Thats just strange.

Comments

It's not fair use

[LordNimon]

Well, not in my opinion at least. The graphic design industry already has something that covers this type of work: royalty-free stock images. A graphic artist can by a book or a CD full of images and/or photographs. The cost of the book/CD covers unlimited royalty-free usage of the images in any way (with the exception of mass re-duplication and sale of the book/CD, of course).

What MIT has done is classic non-fair-use of design work. A professional graphic designer would never have done what MIT did, and based on the article, MIT didn't use a professional:

MIT Professor Ned Thomas, head of the ISN, claimed his daughter created "an interpretive drawing" of the futuristic solider "in a couple of days" for use in the application.

I seriously doubt Prof. Thomas' daughter is a professional graphic designer. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she's a high-school kid who just knows how to use Photoshop.

Sensationalism

[sheriff_p]

Wired have been running this story for a few days with a slightly more balanced persepctive (read it here), the key quote being:

In a letter dated May 3, MIT attorney Mark Fischer admitted that MIT had used this drawing of "Val" in its grant proposal to the Army. But Kelly says because "MIT reproduced a very small number of copies (approximately 25 copies)," of the document for "educational activities," the school did not violate the Lais' rights.

It does seem that at first, one of the MIT professors said their daughter had drawn it, but, the quote above I think says it all...

Re:Sensationalism

[Stonehand]

Smack 'em. Just because MIT is an educational institution does not mean that everything they do is for educational activities.

Was it for scholarly criticism? Was the drawing important /as/ a research matter (and not just in getting money /for/ research)? No, not really.

Hmmm. I wonder what the MIT penalty for plagiarism is. Expulsion? I wonder what they'll do to the responsible employees.

Handy Swipes(tm)

[realgone]

I can understand why Horizon Comics might be upset, but the truth is this sort of thing is extremely common in pitches and proposals -- particularly in my chosen profession of advertising. Heck, there's even a catchy name for it: "swipe". As in, "Hey, I need some swipe of people playing pool for this Budweiser ad." At which point, some junior art director will scamper off and start flipping through magazines and stock books looking for that perfect temp photo.

Everyone understands that this isn't our original artwork, that it's only there to give the client a sense of what the ad could look like and ultimately get them excited enough about the idea to execute it with real art. I have the sense that MIT looked at the illustrations for this Army proposal much the same way.

What does seem like dirty pool, however, is that someone decided to go that one extra and add their own credit line -- "H. Thomas", it looks like? -- to said swipe. And that, my friends, is where we begin to cross the line into outright theft. I'd agree that MIT, at the very least, owes an apology to all involved. (Although I guess creating invisible ninja supersoldiers means never having to say you're sorry, right?)

MIT has Issued an Apology

[Alien54]

MIT apparently has gotten enough flack over this in the past week that they have issued an apology, removed all offending artwork, etc.

This public apology is featured on their news page. See the press release here

Just another example of how timely /. can be at times

;-)

heck even RFN has followed this

;-)