Authorship
Out of context: Reply #42
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- ukit0
OK, put the high-minded theorizing aside for a sec (although I did find your comments interesting). You can sit around all day and argue whether something is "right" or "wrong" but that's always going to be subjective - and you'll never have the ability to force people to do something unless there's some legal basis for it. So what would be applicable in this case are things like copyright law, and patents.
For instance, you could imagine that someone who came up with a unique combination of technologies (displaying a screen which renders graphics that create the illusion of interacting with a live audience) could, in this country at least, file for a patent for that idea, and that's what technology companies do all the time with similar innovations. If you go back and watch the keynote where Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone, one of the first things he says upon introducing "multitouch" is "boy, did we patent the hell out of it" or something to that effect.
In O'Shea's case, this wasn't really on the radar - he wasn't doing this for commercial reasons as far as I can tell, and, given that he was basing his work off an open source project to begin with, it may not have even been possible. And really, there would be no need for him to do so because other artists in that community are not likely to try to steal his work - what would they gain from it, after all? Space150, on the other hand, didn't feel any such constraint, and it made perfect sense from their point of view to simply snatch the work and use it themselves without attributing anything to the original artist.
So how do you resolve that difference in approach between people who expect others to play by the (moral) rules and those who don't really give a shit about them? Maybe this whole "name and shame" process on the internet that we're engaging in now is the antidote to that - although, it's far from guaranteed to work given that a Vimeo thread isn't really going to reach that many people.