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LogoThief

logothief.com

58 pointseksith35 comments

I used to live with a designer who independently came up with many ideas that we ended up seeing show up over the years. He had come up with this video idea of people's thoughts bubbling over their heads, nothing special, and in the short term a Toronto Dominion bank commercial had the exact same thing. Many designers read/resource all the same sites, it's no wonder there are similar designs. I figure this explains some of the "less compelling" duplicates, perhaps it was just people thinking along the same lines?

I agree, but which designs on the subbed site are less compelling?

this one by a wide margin

http://www.logothief.com/jose-cant-think-outside-the-square/

also some of these are different enough to very easily be reached independently.

http://www.logothief.com/the-great-international-coffee-cup-...

Even I designed a logo like that once for a coffee shop at my university.

A couple of the coffee cups might not be direct copies, but the majority of them clearly are. The proportions and shapes are all nearly identical.

If you described this logo to ten random web designers and asked them to draw what you described, you would end up with ten considerably different looking cups of coffee. With these logos, almost all of the coffee cups are the same.

The coffee cup: Many of the cups are identical. Not similar, but identical. I think that different designers would sketch cups that are very nearly the same, but I find it hard to accept that they'd create identical cups. Using steam for F is an idea that many people would arrive at, but these examples are again identical spirals and lengths. (The coffee bean example in the lower right corner stands out because it's obviously nothing like the logo)

The Joca one is definitely "inspired by", but likely not rising to the level of copyright infringement. Same with Milagros Urbanos.

The tea cup is a manipulation of the original - they flipped the tree and changed the colours, but it's a copy apart from that. It's pretty blatant.

I don't know about law, but I feel the designers are right to feel grumpy about it.

I once hired a designer to create a logo and only months later discovered he had poached it from somewhere else. Not all of these companies are "logo thieves", some simply didn't know that the designer they paid to create something original had copied something.

Honestly, I don't think this is stealing in more than just a technical sense. This is little different that a mashup or a cover of an older song. And some of the newer versions are a little better.

Not a big fan of the concept of "intellectual property." The site itself is kind of fun.

Are you real?

Are you just fantasy?

I think it is stealing and it is pretty bad. Intellectual property can be misused when it is used to capture something (whether an artistic expression or an invention) that is not very unique or inventive or creative and would have been easily used and discovered by many others had the original "inventor" or "artist" not created it. At that point, intellectual property becomes oppressive.

But this is not the case here. These are unique artistic expressions. True they are simple, but it is impossible to imagine someone creating the same thing without knowing the original. There is practically an unlimited number of ways one can convey a logo. Protecting the rights of one logo does not meaningfully limit the rights of others (if you ignore the "right" to get artistic work done for free).

In these cases we should allow the artist to have a right to their creation.

You've described the technical meaning of stealing very well. But I don't think it's ontologically possible for a person to own something like these logos. Such ownership is a legal fiction set up by legal traditions whose intellectual property protections have started to become more of a problem than a solution. Their remaining relevance it seems to me is to empower corporations such as IBM and Microsoft to extract rent (in the context of patents), and to give money to attorneys and politicians and lobbyists. It is hard for me to have much sympathy for the notion that such protections are in place in the present context primarily for artist making the logo (in the case of trademark, etc.) when there are so many other interests that hang just a little bit back in the background.

In most cases on the site the copies are undeniably in bad taste. But not something to be protected by law, in my opinion.

Well considering people charge a lot for logo design, and apparently it does take expertise and effort (remember the Yahoo logo debacle?), so shouldn't it be a crime that some logo designer charges a huge sum of money and just copy pastes some other designer's hard work as his own? How would you feel if someone is making money off of your hard work?

Btw I am not entirely sure if the original artist is pressing charges against the copies, but by law, you should have an option to.

I support you in the fight against patent trolls, but this is just out right theft :/

I don't mind people earning money off my hard work? I already did it, and was already paid for it. The only problem I see is that customers are being scammed into thinking they purchased a unique logo... there is contract law to resolve such problems.

Well what if neither of you were contract-hired freelancers? What if you were employees? or founders of your own companies? That kinda chucks contract-law out the window. So how will you ensure people aren't using your company's logo as their own? Remember, it isn't necessary that the company would be willing to change their design/logo just because you are using it too. This discussion extends to design too. Nobody minds using someone else's design if it's good enough.

Oh and you might not mind it, but some people might. The law should provide them protection. The choice to press charges or not should be Yours. There SHOULD be a choice.

Btw, since we are discussing copyrights as a whole, this reminds me of the oatmeal incident. Other sites just picking up his comics and using them to get traffic (and thus diverting traffic what would have been potentially his) is completely wrong. It is depriving him of his hard earned money via those visitors. Now shouldn't the Law help him get what is rightfully his?

I think i understand where you are coming from, these things should never hinder creative process. And you are right. But copyrights exist fundamentally to guard against plagiarism. Not to say "i thought of this first! you can't think of it now!", but yes, sadly in recent times IP has come to that...

All property is a legal fiction, is it not?

>You've described the technical meaning of stealing very well. But I don't think it's ontologically possible for a person to own something like these logos. Such ownership is a legal fiction set up by legal traditions

The same is true for a car, an iPhone or a piece of land.

Any ownership is not "ontological" or natural, it's just as "legal fiction" as intellectual property. Humanity has the custom that a person can have a claim on an item or a piece of land, and that's it.

I don't think you can own a concept in the same way that you can own a car, iphone or plot of land. They're in fundamentally different categories. Ownership of things and land is a perfectly legitimate thing. Ownership of concepts is not.

>Ownership of things and land is a perfectly legitimate thing.

It might be legitimate (or not), but that's another issue -- it still is "legal fiction", that is, there is no "natural law" that justifies people owning a piece of land or anything else for that matter.

It's just something we, as society accept as valid (and not even all societies: there are tribal societies where land belongs to all, for example, or societies where land belongs to the crown).

In the same sense, ownership of concepts is something that a society can accept as valid (or not). In any case, our society seems to accept the notion just fine, seeing that copying some kind of concepts without permission can land you a hefty fine.

There are demonstrations where, given a set of cues, or just a vague description of a products, designers converge of very very similar designs. We all live in the same culture, and are exposed to the same stimuli... unintentional or convergent replication of ideas is not only possible, but reasonably common.

Additionally, many industries are IP-free, and are doing excellent nonetheless: recipes and fashion come to mind.

At what point does this go from plagiarism to creatively modifying another piece of art?

For example, epic nation's logo is clever in that by rotation, it changes the EZ logo to EN. Is that necessarily plagiarism? Isn't that more akin to a "remix"?

While designers like myself often think of ourselves as the victims here, often the companies are victims as well. Many of them spent money, good money in some cases, to end up with a shady designer or agency ripping off work and selling it as their own. The client is not only left without a mark to represent their brand, having to start all over but they've lost the money they already spent and risk lawsuits for the infringement. This is another good reason to find a reputable designer you can trust. A local designer you've met face to face and know a real name and address will help tremendously as many shady "designers" like to hide behind the anonymity of the internet. This is also the reason why many crowd-sourced services and competitions have been caught with blatantly stolen logos for sale.

Is there any form of recourse if you discover that a designer you hired actually stole a logo?

Sue him?

While several of the examples posted are egregious, I also find several not all that compelling.

Really? I looked at all of them and only found one that wasn't an obvious copy. I've seen similar sites where lots of the accusations seemed sketchy, but these are all really blatant.

And it's not just limited to logos: http://www.geekceo.com/static/images/zoto_zoho.png

There's an old saying by one Mr Picasso that fits this nicely. It's often mistakenly attributed to one Mr Jobs an awful lot too...

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

That one?

Which in itself is attributed to many - I first heard it via Stravinsky, but apparently it's not Picasso's either.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/

I wouldn't be surprised it Picasso hadn't ever said it at all. Even if he had, Picasso created his own genre of art. Actions speak louder than words.

It really doesn't matter where the quote came from. Even when put into proper context (which has rarely happened in the past) the logic behind it is shaky.

Great artists do imitate, as students they copy the techniques and methods of those who came before them, in order to learn and master the skills they will need to make their own art. When they are ready, the truly great artists then proceed to create things that we've never seen before.

In the context of Music, which I understand better than the visual arts, imitation is what a young composer or musician will do. Once they develop their own voice, 'stealing' becomes a thing of great skill: remixing, as it were. In Stravinsky's case, he lifted content from Webern and made it new. Bartok did it with Shostakovich who did it in turn to Tchaikovsky and on and on and circularly.. one of the wonders of studying musical history is tracing the influences, and the mastery of those who took what came before them and made it new.

The process is much more about using another idea as inspiration and a starting point. It's a way to get out of a rut. You'll almost never end up with anything like your starting point.

I've always assumed that this is what the quote is referencing rather than taking actual elements in full as is the case in a few of these examples.

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