How our tribute to “The Hacker Way” pissed off a Facebook designer | Hacker News Reader

How our tribute to “The Hacker Way” pissed off a Facebook designer

elweb.co

45 pointsflexterra44 comments

Hey.

As the hacker behind the version at http://print.imaj.es/ - I figured I'd share my response here too.

Ben's response is understandable - designers and hackers alike are proud of their creations and often are quick and strong-willed in defending their work.

However, the project that he's been running internally at FB itself aped the original British Ministry of Information project during wartime - the keep calm and carry on meme.

Ben's sentiment to keep focused is good. It's so good that when I saw it, I felt a resonance, a reminder that I should be shipping - so that I wanted to right there and then, make it, produce it, ship it.

So I went to work with my (legal) copies of illustrator and photoshop, and crafted my version. (see it here: http://print.imaj.es/products/stay-focused).

The comparison ends here, though. I took the sentence, sure.

But my process is letterpress, with really awesome paper, all made by hand (by me) locally.

So, I think at this point there's a valid conversation about what is art, what is originality, and how that can be defined - my work can easily be seen as derivative, implied.

I don't make a comparison here with Andy Warhol (who's work will far outstrip anything I'll ever make creatively), but Ben's argument here extends to the notion that Warhol's Campbell's soup work is theft; whereas many others (myself included) see it as a valid expression of the modernity the cans represented. I see the poster as a valid expression of the notion of being a developer-entrepreneur, of needing to keep on the track and ship - a mantra we can all live by.

Ben accused me of theft, suggesting I should donate profits to charity. He used language such as this being a rip-off, and worse.

I have thought about it and frankly I don't see it as theft, but as the normal course of art. Theft would be to make it and not reference the original - to ignore the ancestry and pretend it doesn't exist.

And, for the record, I'll donate any profits to charity- if there are any. As it stands, there's little chance the project will even get printed, as there is not yet sufficient orders.

Quite right, sir. But this gives me an idea for a different poster you could make which I think both you and many Hacker News users would appreciate seeing every day:

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum

Andy Warhol produced numerous versions of his Campbell soup, in doing so he added some value in asking questions, if it was just one can of soup this wouldn't have been the case.

A can of soup doesn't equal a painting of a can of soup.

There are many differences.

So @benbarry made some cool posters. Solid idea. Good job buddy. But seriously, everyone involved in this needs to contemplate the ridiculousness of these whiny teenaged first world problems. Print your posters. You can't copyright text on a page.

"You can't copyright text on a page."

uh... what? Of course you can.

Granted, Fair Use may or may not come into play depending upon the length of the text being reused, but "text on a page" is exactly what copyright was invented for in the first place.

> Granted, Fair Use may or may not come into play depending upon the length of the text being reused

Sort of. Judging by a cursory glance at the USPTO indicates that there's no real hard-and-fast rule on just how much you can use, legally, before copyright kicks in. It's really something that has to be decided on a per-case basis:

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html

In short: You can copyright text on a page. That much is obvious--that's why we have copyright, as you pointed out, but it doesn't just depend on length. It depends on presentation, typography, stylistic decisions, and so many other things that this particular situation is probably a legal gray area. That said, I very much doubt a judge would be willing to hear this, and I seriously doubt the designer would bother himself with pestering Facebook to take it to court.

Another argument worth considering is this: At what point does it become copyright and at what point does it become protected speech?

Article A: Geeks super pissed off about someone daring to copy their work

Article B: Nerds insisting that content producers are too dumb to understand that piracy is just a marketing channel.

(repeat ad nauseum)

Article C: Wiseasses that don't distinguish between the ethics of copying and the ethics of (enforcing) copyright.

(stop repeating, please)

The key to successfully using the Internet is to ignore people that type in all caps. Everyone hates everything; no matter what you do, someone is going to claim that it is ruining their life. The key is to ignore them and do what you think is right.

Making a sign that you saw in a photograph is not much different from sticking a clever caption on a picture of Homer Simpson. No, you didn't create the sign or the Homer Simpson character. But that doesn't mean it's not cool or funny.

Am I missing something here? Are they mad that they use their tag line, "Stay focused & keep shipping"? Because the design of the actual poster is different.

Yes, that's what they're mad about. It's the Internet. People are mad about everything.

As a designer, I am impressed with how graciously Collazo handled the situation, and disappointed that he had to go to such lengths to satisfy Barry.

I'm hoping that the inherent bluntness of Twitter exaggerated Barry's response; the poster being sold was a different layout & typeface, not a "straight ripoff".

I'm not saying Barry doesn't have a case, just that if I were in his shoes I wouldn't have reacted in the same way in the least. He's reinforcing a stereotype of designers that I'm not particularly proud of.

Unfortunately he also replied in a similar fashion on his FB page.

The ever-present danger of assuming intent rather than establishing it directly. Sites like Twitter seem to have an uncanny ability to enable a person to shove their foot directly in their mouth.

i can't even see the problem here if they were selling them for $0 profit. let's assume for a second they sold them for $5 each and that is the actual cost of production. would ben show the same hostility to individuals who spent $5 to make the poster for themselves?

that said, i'd think it was a silly response even if they were selling it for profit. do you really want to focus your creative energy defending your authorship of a white poster board with red lettering?

Even at 0 profit, you could say they were stealing profits away from the original author. However, they are not for sale anywhere in their original form. I'd like them to either actually put them up for sale, or encourage others to print them out, but I'd have to respect the original designer's decision not to see his work being duplicated elsewhere.

from where did you extrapolate his "decision not to see his work being duplicated elsewhere"? as far as i was able to tell he simply requested the profits were given to charity- of which there were none.

moreso, and i recognize this is a touchy subject, i'm not sure it's even fair to suggest he conceived these designs.

I based it on his reaction, which as you just said, was to request that any profit be given to charity.

Promoting their own event is not without self-interest, even if the poster sales aren't directly profitable.

Also, it's not authorship over "red on white" as a concept, it's authorship over this specific combination of type, size, layout, & copy that implies association with Facebook. If they just wanted to maintain the message, and not the association, they wouldn't have kept the visual style. Implying an association (with Facebook, or Ben) that isn't really there is the dishonest part.

no one, for all intents and purposes, would associate these signs with facebook.

And why wouldn't they? They're explicitly an homage to a photo that hundreds of thousands of people (especially those in the startup scene) saw.

The most astonishing part in this whole story seems to me the fact that people apparently think that it is a good idea to hang "inspirational" slogans in uppercase on the walls of a modern tech company, in a way that is clearly not meant ironically.

I would run like hell from a company that did this.

hah! Yes!

Better to have read:

IPO TIME.

YOU JOB IS AT RISK.

WORK HARDER.

Seeing your post brings the following to mind:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

This Barry guy is seriously mad about a sign using his unoriginal slogan?

Here is a solution:

I release the following to the public domain:

STAY FOCUSED AND KEEP SHIPPING

There you go, just copy and paste this into your design program of choice, pick a big font, and send it to the printers.

Crisis averted

Doesn't kinko's handle fairly large prints? Seems like it shouldn't be that hard or expensive to print off a large sheet of paper with some big words in red Impact.

Do you not see this as immoral and disrespectful to the original artist?

Not really. As far as I can tell, the original artist wasn't selling his works, right? And apologies in advance to all the designers reading this, but the posters are a sentence fragment in a standard font. They're not printing off bootleg copies of the Mona Lisa here.

I suppose I'm being immoral and disrespectful, myself. Should I send Dos Equis a letter of apology, see if KC Green sells prints of his comics, and try to track down both the artists working on the Spiderman show as well as the person who placed text on this image? http://imgur.com/3CHhp

Let me know if I'm factually wrong in any of my statements.

"But the posters are a sentence fragment in a standard font. They're not printing off bootleg copies of the Mona Lisa here."

---

A 63-year-old Picasso got out his pen and paper and sketched the woman, who passing by had asked for a quick self-portrait of herself.

It took him 30 seconds, once finished, he asked for 500,000 US dollars.

'Why? It didn't even take you a minute!' she replied.

'Madam, that sketch took 63 years."

And off he walked, with the sketch in his pocket.

That's cool and all, but these folks are hardly Picasso, and the art in question could've been trivially generated by picking a few words at random from a database and adding color.

Don't treat this like a masterpiece.

I think many people on hacker news recognize good design skill takes years to develop, but this is an extreme. They took a simple four word sentence and printed it in red. Do you think the public benefits by having this designer have a ~150 year copyright monopoly on something as simple as this sentence?

It's a simple poster people were excited about and when it was unavailable went out to make it themselves.

Apparently, Ben Barry just released the posters under Creative Commons.

https://twitter.com/#!/benbarry/status/165493765526667264

as lame as it sounds, i was looking to buy these posters as inspiration for my 'hacker way' office :(

originals were here: http://www.designforfun.com/display.php?id=115&e=1

It's linked from the blog.

"Error Establishing database connection" I think we killed the site.

Edit, it's working for now

I can understand how making a profit off of something like that could rub you the wrong way. However I think I personally would just be happy the message was worthwhile to other people and leave it at that.

"The Hacker Way" is no excuse to steal.

Your intentions are irrelevant. Unless somebody has clearly stated you can reproduce their creative work you shouldn't, nor should you want to.

Please do not use the guise of a 'hacker mentality' to mask your lazy and disrespectful actions.

Good artists copy, great artists steal?

Good artists copy, greats artists steal and make that they've stolen their own.

We are all influenced by the same things, it's what you do with that influence that matters.

Why do I think that by your tone and anonymity you are the offended designer?

I'm a designer (and developer, depending on the task).

Not the designer.

So, are you a good designer, or one who's work has never been used by others?

Did they also pay "tribute" to Adobe by downloading a copy of Photoshop from a torrent site and using it?

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