My comment: ...if you take someone else's image and mess around with it and manipulate it to fit your own vision of a Tshirt, providing the source image is not obvious, are your actions truly against the spirit of copyright law?
Yes. (Somu's response)
I wasn't actually asking the question, Solmu - it was rhetorical. I was coming from a philosophical angle, not a legal one. I understand your points about copyright law (although I don't think it's anywhere near as black and white as you are insisting - the law rarely is with such matters).
Solmu and Monkeylantern,
I have no doubt that you are both correct in your assertions that it is easily possible to identify manipulated art and its original source. My point, though, is that with many thousands of little Tshirt companies out there, the odds of anyone in the know actually seeing manipulated art in the first place to identify it are very tiny. Not that I'm advocating breaking the copyright laws...
Solmu: "Music and visual art clearly aren't the same thing. Besides that... they're not all recognised as original works... that's sort of the point."
No, it's not the point I was making at all. Of course, music and visual art aren't "the same thing", but my ANALOGY between the use of the 12 bar blues structure as a foundation for endless varieties of original songs and a source image as a foundation for the creation of a derivative, but variant image in the service of a new, original design vision holds true for art design, at least in the context in which I was writing.
Solmu goes on: "12 bar blues format is like the 256 colour palette - it's a medium in which to create something from scratch. You're not meant to take someone's composition and change a few notes, or take someone's image and change a few pixels."
With respect, this is nonsense. The 12 bar blues structure is nothing like the 256 colour palette. The western scale of notes equates to the 256 colour palette. 12 bar blues uses a chord progression derived from the western scale, then the melodies that arise from that chord progression complete the blues song (performance factors aside - but we are talking pure theory here, because in blues the performance is integral to the art). The 12 bar structure is not "a medium in which to create something from scratch". It is a progression that has already been created from "scratch", "scratch" being the western scale.
Similarly, I would argue (philosophically, not legally, although I really do not think the two can always be neatly separated) that just as there are thousands of blues songs that vary very little on paper, all sharing exactly the same chord progression, and many sharing almost identical melodies, the points of differentiation being in the performance and lyrics, there can be designs that share the same representational form, while retaining a sense of originality that derives from the artist's unique vision and the treatment of that representational form in the service of that vision.
I disagree, also, with your declaration: "You're not meant to take someone's composition and change a few notes, or take someone's image and change a few pixels." That is clearly not supported by the evidence in music. Many, many blues songs barely even change "a few notes" - all that changes in many cases is the vocal and instrumental interpretation and the lyrics. Change those things enough and you move to a completely different genre - rock and roll - while retaining very similar melodies and the exact chord progression of hundreds of blues songs that came before.
I would contend that representational art should not be copyrightable at all. The form of an apple, for example, comes from nature - it just is. If an artist draws that apple purely representationally, where is the art? There is craft, certainly, but I would contend that there is no art. Can you copyright craft? I think not.
Even non-representational art is a grey area in terms of "originality". Someone like Picasso has an original vision, and with Braque, kicks off the cubism movement. Other artists "see" differently for the first time thanks to Picasso, and start creating their own interpretations of that original vision. Can Picasso copyright his vision? No. So, even non-representational art is a grey area in terms of originality and therefore, copyright.
Philosophically, I don't see why it is not valid to take a design, manipulate it in pursuit of your own, unique vision, and end up with a new design, and I do not see why any infringement of copyright has taken place. Passing off another artist's actual work as your own is quite clearly, of course, an infringement of copyright, but the manipulation of a design to arrive at another design? This is territory that invokes the charge that the law is an ***, since the law denies the unarguable truth that ALL art is allusory in its basic nature.