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Graffiti Artist Sues Grand Theft Auto Creators
Thanks to EvilAvatar for pointing to an Entertainment Law Digest synopsis about a graffiti artist suing over unauthorized use of his work in Grand Theft Auto III. The article says that "Christopher Ellis asserts that Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive Software copied, used, and distributed his artwork, [made under the name] Daze" in GTA3, and Daze's official website has examples of his work, which was allegedly scanned into Grand Theft Auto's gritty urban environments without his knowledge.
The copyright notice is one of the biggest pieces of misinformation in modern law.
There's no requirement for the creator an a work (public or private) to put a copyright notice on his work - instead, original creations are considered copyrighted material until proven/made otherwise.
Of course take-2 is in the wrong, but how wrong are they? They've highly publicized this man's creations, which weren't originally signed, it appears. In other words, they're no different from the originals, and while he isn't getting credit in the game, he isn't getting credit on the street either.
There seems to be a large misconception that all graffiti artists are vandalizing property without prior consent.
Yes, there is a large amount of work that is created by general people who tag anything from subways to bilboards, but 90% of graffiti "artists" actually get city permission to do their work on certain buildings. Some are even commisioned for it.
If you take a look at the guys website, you'll see he's not exactly showing off street signs and railroad cars with his signature scribbled in paint. It looks more like alley ways and school buildings that he was most likely asked to paint or got permission beforehand.
Have you seen a cop show or MTV video lately? Notice all of those blurs on shirts/hats? Those are usually trademarks or copyrights that they don't want to acquire rights to use. Examples could include a Nike hat, a Simpsons shirt, etc. IIRC, on the Dogma special features Kevin Smith's shirt was blurred on some of his extra stuff, and when he was talking about his original distributor on the commentary it was bleeped out. Intellectual property law is a convoluted subject right now, and most are erring on the side of caution to avoid this kind of lawsuit.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Well, Smilebit/Sega managed to get his permission to use his art in Jet Set Radio Future on XBox - I don't think Rockstart/Take two should have any less of an obligation in this department.
If there is no statement of ownership, no reasonable means of finding out who did create it, the building owners/occupiers no longer have a record, it was created under an untracable alias, etc. At what point can they be considered to have done everything reasonably possible to contact him and get to use it by default? Does there ever come a point where being uncontactable releases copyright?
Copyright is never released for this reason. If you can't contact the copyright owner (or someone else who has permission to sublicense it), it is impossible to license the work, and it is illegal to use it.
This is one situation the Public Domain Enhancement Act is designed to prevent - people would have to be contactable to maintain their copyrights.
Also, who owns the copyright? The artist who created the artwork or the owners of the building that he created it "for"?
If it's considered a work for hire, the building owner would probably get the copyright. If he did this as a volunteer, or the building owner gave him a donation or tip rather than a payment, the artist probably holds the copyright. But this is something the courts would have to decide.
Even if Rockstar gets the charges dismissed on the basis that the building owner holds the copyright, the owner would gain the ability to sue the company for copyright infringement.
And after looking at his website, and skimming through his art work (which he claims is in the game), i cant see a single one of the images that i have seen in the game, or at least remember i have seen. One thing to mention though is that they both have the same approach of drawing, but they are not copied or scanned as he says, the images in GTA are toally different, as i recall.
The lunatic is in my head
On some teleprinters, backspace would work like this, e.g. if you wanted to change floff to fluff:
I hate floff/f/f/ouff.
Or something like that.
Ask yourself why on earth anyone in their right mind would decide not to implement backspace - unless it was physically impossible. In fact, that's why it's called 'backspace' and not 'delete' (as it should have been called). If you print a space backwards over a character, the character remains unaffected, leaving the next character to overprint it. This may also be a hangover from the typewriter.
Delete was such a good idea (but ASCII was invented before VDUs), that they had to squeeze it in to the ASCII set by re-using 127 for it.