Lost Property

DESIGN COPYRIGHT: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' So said Pablo Picasso. These days, plagiarism is as rife as ever and in the design industry, it's becoming an increasing contentious issue

ORIGINAL and creative design is, depending on who you ask, either of vital importance to business or vastly overrated - either way businesses are spending more on communication than ever before. In Europe in 2003, creative industries provided 5.6 million jobs and 2.6 per cent of EU GDP. I know this because I lifted the information, indeed the entire sentence, from a report written by someone else. But how common is design theft - ideas and images copied from other work and dragooned into service for unsuspecting businesses?

Ireland's creative industries are relatively small, though their product is important. In the not too distant past Irish businesses paid scant attention to visual communication. The boom started to change this, not only with the entrance of international brands into the Irish marketplace but also the rise of local business tailoring their messages to an increasingly sophisticated audience. Even now, with a recession in full swing, the design industry will remain important - the rise of the internet has made design more important than ever and branding, advertising and print design remain commercially vital as globalisation exposes Irish consumers to the best in international graphics and copywriting.

This doesn't mean that all of the visual communication on display in Ireland is original.

Andrew Jackman, co-founder of Limerick-based agency GHQ Design, recently encountered a piece of copywriting he thought evoked work his firm had done previously.

Working on a commercial supplement for a Sunday newspaper, GHQ came up with a tag line about eco-conscious building that read: "Your blueprint for a greener home." Some time later, Jackman discovered a firm in the green building sector was using the phrase, "For a greener blueprint," as its slogan. Jackman has also seen visual work that bears more than a passing resemblance to his own work.

He isn't accusing anyone of copying his work, but he thinks the similarities are noteworthy: "Once you're actively looking at stuff you start to see patterns.

"There are definitely genuine cases where there is a shared result based on similar briefs," he said.

Earlier this year the issue of originality in design came to the fore thanks to the elections. Prior to the public going to the polls, Fine Gael proudly unveiled its new website, which offered visitors a wide range of information in a customisable format. Unfortunately, the party's new site was eerily similar to the bbc.co.uk homepage.

The debacle didn't get much attention in the press but it could have been politically damaging. Fine Gael denies their site is an illegal clone of the BBC's made using pinched code, but web designer Stephanie Francis investigated the programming code that handles the layout of both sites and discovered it was peculiarly familiar looking.

"It was so uncanny, so extremely similar, that I wondered how similar it was under the hood," said Francis.

Francis discovered the CSS code used to format Fine Gael's web pages was very close to the BBC's code. She questioned whether it could possibly have been someone's impression of the BBC site.

Fine Gael's communications office responded to Francis's inquiry about the site, saying the "errors" had been corrected. The e-mail continued: "The new website is not a direct copy of the BBC website. All design work on the website was done in-house."

For the design industry, such a response isn't enough. Francis sees the issue as being one of respecting intellectual property and creativity.

"People have been called up for copying other people's speeches [in the Dáil] - this is worse. There doesn't seem to be any real respect for the industry in Ireland."

The Fine Gael case gets to the heart of the issue: it is virtually impossible to prove conclusively if the design was stolen or merely inspired. As design is a commercial activity, there are potential legal issues not to mention the fact copied or derivative designs ultimately result in 'brand malfunction'. Indeed, the consensus among designers is that Fine Gael's website is uniquely unsuited to its job, offering functionality that is confusing and unnecessary.

And so the ambiguity of design piracy continues. Stockart.com, a firm that resells logo designs by freelancers, accused American designer Jon Engle of ripping off its work and allegedly billed him for $18,000. There was one small problem: Engle claimed his work predated that sold by Stockart.com. At the time of writing it is unclear what the truth is. Richard Askew, the founder of stockart.com, issued a statement saying the company has always sought to defend its designers' work, adding: "I personally have uncovered over 500 for-profit companies who have stolen over 8,000 images from my artists." Engle did not respond to questions from The Irish Times.

Not all cases of lookalike designs are necessarily nefarious. Freelance designer Oisín Prendiville says you have to be aware of other people influencing your work and this can happen inadvertently, especially if a designer - or client - is already thinking in derivative terms.

"If a designer is looking to find where the line lies between being inspired by and copying a particular design, they are already approaching their design in the wrong way," he says.

Pablo Picasso famously said: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Nevertheless, despite the mind-boggling sums involved in the sale of contemporary art, it remains primarily an aesthetic activity. Design, however, is about business. "Admiring other design is an important part of being a design professional. But the critical thing for designers is to interpret and appreciate good design as effective communication rather than as an aesthetic object," says Prendiville.

It's easy to get carried away with accusations of plagiarism and the issue has reached fever pitch in the age of the internet. One thing missing from most discussions is the fact there is no copyright on an idea, but copyright covers the particular execution of an idea.

It's not just graphic design that throws up problems. Photography can be a tricky area too. If two people photograph a building from the same angle, even if one is directly inspired by the other, it is not plagiarism. It may be poor form to publish such an image but it is not against the law.

Nevertheless, in 2005 a photographer was sacked by the Richmand Times-Dispatch newspaper in the US after submitting a food photography image that was similar to that used by a style magazine. The similarities were clear but whether or not the image was a direct imitation of another is open to interpretation.

Andrew Jackman remains circumspect and while he thinks greater respect for intellectual property is imperative he also feels the industry is developing at its own pace.

"Design as an industry needs to grow: the natural course of it is for people to be ripped-off and for there to be problems within the industry and then for things to develop and laws to catch-up."

DESIGN DRAMA - WHEN ORIGINALITY SEEMS TO BE MISSING

Scottish Arts Council vs Quark Inc

How much more embarrassed could a company be? Quark Inc, one of the world's leading software developers for the graphic design, advertising and publishing industries, wanted to turn around its image of being unresponsive to its customers.

The firm unveiled new software, new customer relations policies and a new corporate image. Unfortunately for Quark, its new corporate logo bore a more than striking resemblance to that of the Scottish Arts Council. In this case no one really suspected copying, but it was an embarrassing and costly mistake - Quark had to start all over again and get new branding created.

Fine Gael vs BBC

Red faces all round at party headquarters when designers and bloggers noted that Fine Gael's new website was not only inspired by the look and feel of the BBC's homepage, but appeared to be using the same actual CSS, the code that creates the layout, without authorisation or acknowledgement. Fine Gael subsequently tweaked the site several times, adding unique material, but the site's aesthetic remains visually similar to the BBC.