Of course it's not OK. It's not OK to take from another without asking. In fact, it's bad. You should remember your mom telling you all this. (If this is not the sort of thing your mother taught you as a child, perhaps your parole officer has some pamphlets you could look at.) No, the reason it is news at all these days is how common and how easy it has become. It's the ubiquity of the problem. The quandary is as close as the .jpeg helper app called your World Wide Web Browser.
To look at an image, you must first download it. What you have then is an exact copy of the image as it was presented by (presumably) the original artist. Well, well, well. What to do with the little bugger then, eh? Why not...perhaps paste another image onto it. Yeeeesss. And another, yes, and another. Hey, this is fun, and it's ever so much easier than learning to draw. In the end, the moral question boils down to your perception of what is acceptable to your conscience in the production of your art.
I'm not even really going to bother with the whole question of digital photography/electronic painting/collage/multimedia/etc. (Is it ART?), except to note that as a practitioner I am getting every describeable manner of flack from people who thirty years ago were wearing black berets, smoking French cigarettes and going mad trying to defend photography as ART, and who today own art galleries that show photos and who are now going mad insisting that whatever the stuff flashing across my computer screen is, it is NOT ART, and ain't can't never gonna be. They are wrong, of course. They are blind. It is too tiresome. Their hats are too tight. Art is art.
You really want to get sidetracked about what's going to happen to all your fancy camera equipment? All your fancy films, flash meters, blah, blah, blah? Hmmm. What happened to makers of equestrian equipment? What happened to crystal radio sets? If you want to make traditional silver nitrate prints for very much longer, you had better learn how to prepare you own emulsions. I've been barking about this on-and-off for a dozen years or so. It's coming, it's just late, that's all. The fact is that chemical photography is doomed. Well, yes, let's shed a tear, but hey, it had 150 good years. It changed the world. So did the steam engine. It's just, well, over. It will continue to exist, as stone lithography and copper mezzotint do, the practice of the few, the determined. But the good times are gone.
No, I'm not crazy. All things must pass. Have you tried to make a carbon print lately? How 'bout a six color gum-bichromate? What do you think you can do with that forty pound load of original Kodachrome you just found in Granddad's freezer besides appropriate the nifty logos off of the boxes? Times change. B&W photographic materials are already more expensive than colour ones and Kodak Photo CD is even cheaper.
There is nothing wrong with this. Every one I ever respected as a photographer spent so much time working on the prints that manufacturing the paper they were printed on wouldn't have been that much of a stretch. Indeed some of them do exactly that. A beautiful print is a beautiful thing, in the sense that it can be held, cared for, admired, and its possession of some beauty as an object that cannot be reproduced on computer screens or even in museum catalogs.
The Art market in photography was always peanuts, in any event. Aside from the occasional Famous Dead (or nearly dead) White Male Photographer, hardly any one can make a living. The only photographers with any claim to art with their noses above water work in the advertising trade. The money for other photographers such as it is is made piecemeal in small places, spread among the people who dominate the local tourist landscape field and those who hold equity in companies that photograph children in the local high schools. The annual Christmas Craft Fair might produce the scattered print sale. Arts Councils sometimes give grants. You can do weddings on weekends. We who dream and hold photography dear do not matter. The money is in images, photography be damned.
Which brings us back to appropriation and the ridiculous ease with which a weekend net surfer can suck up a hard drive full of other people's images.
Anybody with Photoshop, or even a pair of scissors, can take files from an Internet site or grab magazines from a dentist's office and then snip, paste and scribble up a "work of art". I know any idiot can do it because snipping up magazine photos is, in fact, a required activity at government-sponsored job-search training courses for welfare recipients. What economic recovery value lies in a collection of green-haired punks, paranoid morons, newly redundant stock traders and heavily talented yet inexplicably underemployed magazine writers sitting around a long plywood table with glue sticks and a pile of glossy magazines is not known to me but it's costing the taxpayer plenty, so it must be beneficial. Perhaps it's a recycling thing.
Don't get me wrong, it's loads of fun. Sticking Bart Nagel's head on a camel and flying it through the eye of a big needle is a pleasant way to pass an afternoon. But if I framed it and hung it down at the ROM, well, as the Barenaked Ladies would be quick to point out, it would be wrong.
But all of this is about as inventive as running Shakespeare through McBork!
Amusing, even charming in a way, but I doubt that Willie would have been thrilled with it. He may not have seen the humor in having the Prince of Denmark lurching around spouting gibberish like the Swedish Chef muppet. Blank verse was big business in those days, and he may have missed the joke. He may have been concerned that his intellectual property was being infringed. Of course the Bard is long dead and so are all his lawyers, so who cares? Dead means fair game. If you can paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa and flog it as art, more power to you. Leonardo won't object.
If Leon were alive, though, it might be a different story. His objection would probably take a form familiar to us all: direct action and/or massive legal retaliation. Lawyers, guns and money. That is how cases of copyright infringement are generally addressed by the complainants today. Appropriation is morally bad as I mentioned, and usually bad art as well, but that's not the problem. The problem is getting paid more for it than you will eventually be sued.
When legal questions arise, as they do from time to time, I know better than to guess at answers and so I ask the pros, which is what I did in this case. Who would better know the ramifications of art theft than the sharpsters haunting can.legal, I wondered? Surely some bright young McGill alumnus could tear him/her/it self away from the raging arguments on gun control that were sucking up the bandwidth on usenet that month long enough to tie up this nasty, nagging question of who owns what. But I was wrong. No one seems to care. My request for opinions disappeared like a pebble tossed into the surf off Agate Beach on Haida Gwaii. It was gone in a flash and left no discernible ripple. Not a single reply. Very unusual in a forum where a nightmare of conflicting opinion generally dogs every issue at every turn. Perhaps the subject is too hot to handle.
But I was wrong about that, too, as I soon discovered when I lobbed the same questions into rec.arts.fine and a few other likely newsgroups. It seems to be a non-issue everywhere, except in court and between the covers of Wired and its wannabees. There were only a handful of replies and typical of them was that of Jeremiah Blatz, who said that he often works in collage, and that while some may call that appropriation he is "always careful to work within fair use restrictions", which, last time I checked, allows one only to use small examples of another's work and only in the context of a review or scholarly examination. Mr. Blatz goes on to say that he wouldn't care if someone appropriated his stuff as long as it fell within these (I believe largely mythical) "fair use" restrictions. I have heard a lot about "fair use", and what I hear could only lead one to conclude that "fair use" is anything I do to your stuff, and "plagiarism" is anything you do to my stuff.
RubyRedEyes reports that she has no qualms about appropriating. She writes:
"Walt Disney Productions is one of the most aggressive defenders of their copyright. I have heard they prosecuted a day-care center for painting Disney characters on their walls without permission. I have used Disney characters (specifically the Seven Dwarfs and Snow White) in another parody that has the seven dwarfs tying a naked Snow White to the top of a pinball machine preparatory to raping her."
Kinky, I say. Flogging, Disney's lawyers may demand. RubyRedEyes goes on to explain her relatively low anxiety level regarding legal fallout by modestly assuming that her work will never gain recognition. This was a common theme: I am small fry, they'll never bother with me. If there is any truth to that horrible daycare story, it may not be a safe assumption. The spectre of savage children-bashing shysters may not go away just because you are smaller than a breadbox. Disney's attorneys would probably slap injunctions on a paramecium if one could be found that resembled Sneezy. If you appropriate, you should start expecting trouble. Those whose work you pirate will sooner or later want to fix the situation and you in the bargain. This brings us back, once again, to technical considerations.
The traditional remedies like mail bombs and relentless litigation may not be available much longer, due to high-res scanners, and worse, film printers capable of exceeding the resolution of conventional film. (Chemical photography is dead.) These devices will soon make their way from military espionage labs to the well-heeled desktop. Once the resolvable pixel size of a computer image is smaller than the grain of photographic emulsions, there is suddenly no way to tell a laser-printed piece of film from a camera original. I can copy your work and print it to film, and my negative will look exactly like yours. Exactly. And when that happens, ownership of any image will become a very difficult thing to prove with complete certainty.
This has desperate implications for the legal types, even those not concerned with copyright filigree. When "photographic evidence" comes to mean, well, nothing, because any image can be altered and printed, then the lawyers will have a new toy to play with.
Case in point: in Alice's Restaurant, Arlo Guthrie tells of how he was once arrested with great precision by local authorities. The crime was littering, and much was made of the photographic evidence which seemed to identify a particular piece of trash as belonging to Guthrie. The judge found him guilty on the basis of the arresting officer's evidence and descriptions of what was in the photos. However, if Arlo had made the fateful garbage act today instead of in the sixties, by the time it came to court his defense attorneys would be able to have "...the 8*10 color glossy photos with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back explaining what each one was..." thrown out of court, on the grounds that there is no way prove the photos weren't cooked up on a suitably equipped PC.
Video evidence will be even more laughably inadequate because the dramatically crappier quality of video makes it that much easier to manipulate. Already I have seen videotape that clearly shows O.J. enjoying a Slurpy with Forrest Gump at a Seattle 7-11 at the time the murders are alleged to have taken place.
But never mind that. Criminal lawyers will never be short of work. It's the "civil" strain we're concerned with here. They are causing the problem, and I predict that they will eventually solve the entire appropriation quandary by doing what they do best: swarming around like cockroaches and suing every one in sight. Respondents' lawyers will respond with hydra-headed multiple independently targeted counter-actions. Their zeal in filing copyright infringement suits will choke our already overburdened legal system. They will incite so much litigation that the government will be forced to enact new laws in an effort to fumigate the courts.
This is where it gets interesting.
Never a particularly astute body when it comes to moral questions, the government will opt for a simple, practical decision that circumvents any sticky ownership questions. They will scratch their heads, make technical queries that they will not understand the answers to, appoint a White Paper Commission (and ignore its findings), and in the end, smiling for the cameras and patting themselves on the back, they will strut forward and announce the only solid, simple, encompassing solution possible. They will decide that there will be no problems with divining originality in works of art ...if there are no originals. The hoof-and-mouth cure. Our leaders will decide that all artists must use other people's images, and exclusively so, to prevent copyright suits from jamming the legal apparatus of the land, and (in California) to avoid stigmatizing the untalented.
Artists who aspire to anything more public than cave paintings will be required to appropriate all of their work. All of it. Every scrap. Artistic communism. It's the only way to level the playing field. Artists will also be required to keep references and provide an audit trail to keep life simple for the federal bureaucrats who will be necessary to administer the new policies and assess taxes, which naturally will be necessary to provide moneys for the appropriation appropriation. The courts will clear, every one will be an artist, joy will fill the land, thousands will cheer and Parliament will commission a portrait of the Minister Of Justice to be appropriated from some old Yusof Karsh stuff that was kicking around the national archives.
So here is wisdom. Here is the future: unless you can show that 100% of your content is legally appropriated, it will be assumed to be stolen, and the burden of disproof will fall on you. Since (dis)proof is technically impossible, you will be in deep do-do. It is just barely possible that some easement may be provided for those who previously made fancy claims that they produced original work. Existing original drawings and negatives can, perhaps, be grandfathered-in if the work can subsequently be put on CD-ROM and made accessible to all on the Information SuperTarbaby. However, since the penalties for unprovable originality will be stiff (all of your assets will be annexed, commandeered, confiscated, expropriated, preempted, and/or seized), it will be safer to burn the stuff.
Tidy, eh? Not perfect, though. There are still questions, like: If I appropriate a work that was constructed from work that was originally appropriated from me, should I sue myself? Can I scribble on stuff myself, or should I appropriate an existing scribble? But these are minor details, and case law should deal with them quickly.
The happy days are coming, my friend. Let us embrace them fully and toast them with D'Artangion's stirring battle cry: All for one, and one for all!