Spike Lee responds to 'stolen' poster designer | Hacker News Reader

Spike Lee responds to 'stolen' poster designer

uk.movies.yahoo.com

45 pointsAmadou61 comments

Looks like Spike Lee has just made the mother of all hypocritical "its OK to pirate my movie" responses:

“Why Should I Pay Someone Who I Never Met Nor Had Any Contact With Ever? He Never Made Any Deal With Me. Why Don’t You Pay Me For Your Stupid Text On Thanksgiving Day?”

So you think the guy's an idiot, but you still want to see his movies?

Someone can be both an idiot and a good cook/director/whatever...

Not to mention he doesn't think he's an idiot: just a jackass.

Rationalizing piracy is no trivial thing, although it seems to be popular in places like Hacker News.

Didn't Lee pirate those graphics in the first place?

Criminalizing piracy is no trivial thing either. Once you can get over the fact that piracy is a complicated issue, that it is unlike stealing things -- where the owner of some object is deprived of his original possession, we can get to talking about piracy in a serious and mature way.

which is why people are choked, becuase Lee is part of Big Media and rationalizing piracy at the same time. The hypocrisy is... hard to ignore

You miss the point. Spike Lee's argument is that he never employed the artist, even though his film company ultimately decided on the agent who promoted the film.

If he complains about piracy, all we have to do now is state on twitter:

"I Never Heard Of This Spike Lee,If He Has A Beef It's Not With Me.I Did Not Buy Him,Do Not Know Him.Cheap Trick Writing To Me.YO"

Looks like, to me, that unless Lee backs down, he'll be being mocked for quite some time to come :-)

It is still possible to respect intellectual property rights, authorship, be against piracy, support the allegedly-wronged artist, AND find Spike Lee to be an idiot.

The problem with piracy advocates is that they will seize any opportunity to justify piracy, and this is sadly no different. Too many people unfortunately see this as a black-and-white situation where you either support Spike Lee or support pirating his work.

By all means mock him, that's completely deserved.

I'm not saying that you should commit piracy. I'm saying that Spike Lee has put himself in an interesting position where he is now advocating piracy, and this may well be the response he starts getting if he complains his work is stolen in the future.

It's more ironic than right.

P.S. I've voted you up, I agree with you.

I am totally on board with you in terms of Spike Lee coming across as a total knob, but, unfortunately, and as evidenced by this thread, there are people who will never fail to latch on to these cases and use strawmen like Spike Lee as an excuse for some eye-for-an-eye Internet justice by means of piracy.

As long as someone can get downvoted to -4 for making that very basic point on Hacker News, the point apparently still has to be made, even though it's a waste of time for people like you who see the nuance of it. :)

no it's pretty trivial

Who said anything about piracy? If anything, it's Spike Lee who "pirated" the designers copyright.

Kanye West

> Why Should I Pay Someone Who I Never Met Nor Had Any Contact With Ever? He Never Made Any Deal With Me.

So if you use an agent, no responsibility?

Comes off a bit like an "I didn't steal your bike, I'm just riding this nice bike my friend found for me" excuse.

Well, it is Hollywood. When it comes to financial scheming they give Wall Street a real run for their money.

It's not Spike's issue, but to be blunt this is a really stupid response. If he really doesn't give a damn he could just say we're looking into it, and if he wants to use this as an amazing opportunity for a bunch of free publicity he could roll with this and take advantage.

How is it not his issue? You don't get to use something stolen just because someone else stole it for you.

If the CMO steals someone's logo, do you blame the CTO?

The CTO? No. The CEO? Hell yeah.

If the CTO is the face of the company, then sure. it's not as if shaming the ad agency is going have nearly the same impact. It's Spike Lee's movie, he's the beneficiary, and he's not some fledgling director with no influence on the studio.

Yup.

His company is distributing an infringing work. As a head of his company he should care because he's likely about to be sued for it if he does't make the guy happy.

I Wonder Why Spike Lee Writes His Tweets With So Many Capitals. Does Everything He Writes Look Like This? Now I'm Imagining His Love Letters.

Or His Scripts?

Maybe he thinks everything he says is a headline :P

I guess he's a capitalist.

From somebody who hired the crammy agency AND used the end (STOLEN) result in his poster, he comes of as a total jerk.

I don't care if some minion did the bad deed for him. When he employs someone (I'm talking of the agency) he has to man up and take responsibility for what they did in his name, especially if AFTER the wrongdoing happened and was pointed to them, he still profits from it.

I'd sue his ass to oblivion if I was the designer.

As a 10 year freelancer, doing a ton of agency work, it's not Spike's issue. His production company hired an agency to do ad promotion for a movie he "helped" make. The design guy was star struck and fairly new in the freelance realm and didn't do a proper job with his business logistics.

It sucks, but it's not Spike Lee's issue. It's like blaming Obama for how a vendor screwed some engineer over while setting up the version control system during the build of the ACA site.

The original letter didn't blame Spike, it asked him to intervene. You are definitely correct in the technical sense, but Spike's responses have been extremely tone-deaf. Instead of saying "not my problem" he should have said, "I'll have someone look into it."

I admire Spike Lee's movies, but from public appearances, he's never struck me as the sort of person who gives much of a shit about what anybody but himself thinks of anything.

I have to ask then, what informs his opinions?

If the ACA contractors that Obama's administration chose stole the web design from a freelance designer and then Obama responded with the BS Mr.Lee is spewing, can you imagine the shitstorm that would cause?

Yes, it's bad PR, but it's not Spike Lee's issue. Sure, he could be better at the PR angle, especially for a person in his current position, but considering how he got to his position, I would guess that good PR wasn't his forte.

So, if I hire an agent to handle something, I am not responsible for their conduct? I don't think I agree with that.

So, if I — hypothetically — see Spike Lee driving my stolen car, I should stay quiet because it's not Spike's issue?

I get what you are saying, but it has now become Spike's issue, unless he abides by "All publicity is good publicity, even bad publicity".

Just like many companies drop their sponsorships when their celebrities misbehave. For example Tiger Woods after his affair scandal.

No, it's not like that at all.

It's Spike Lee's production company. He directly derives profit from it. He controls it.

The buck stops at the top, as it always does.

Yes, it stops at the top if there's enough public weight behind it. The guy was star struck about the work that could potentially go in his portfolio and was screwed because he didn't lock up contracts ahead of time. His post was a hail Mary since he didn't do pursue due diligence ahead of time. It sucks, especially since it happened to an individual, but he'll grow from this and learn what not to do.

ps: my cynicism isn't typical of midwesterners in the U.S. I've had many learning experiences over the years that are very similar to this. It all helped me become much better at running a business. If I hadn't had those experiences early on, I wouldn't know what to do preemptively now.

That's a BS comparison. Spike is an indie film-maker. The movie posters are a very visible part of the film.

I'd say it's more like the President worrying about a website.

It's very possible the agency is Spike DDB, which was founded by Spike Lee. If so, the buck stops with Spike.

Also possible that the agency is 1124design.com, which has worked on many of Spike's previous films.

He doesn't gain rights to distribute since he was unaware of the infringement. Every poster he stuck out there, every web advert he paid for: possibly liable for damages for it.

Now that he's aware, and appears to be uncaring about the matter while distributing the infringing work further, he may be liable for even more per infringement.

The artist originally came to SL to ask him to handle this, presumably amicably and for "yeah, we'll pay you like we would have had we hired you" type levels. Now that SL is baiting the guy, he may just ignore the ad firm and go straight after SL as well.

Spike Lee is very much the right addressee.

Garcia kindly asked him for help, presenting both of themselves as victims of a shady middleman, leaving plenty of room for Lee not only to come out on top and save his face, but even to turn this into great publicity for the movie.

Apparently, Lee decided otherwise.

Um...here are our top comments on that thread:

Seems weird he mentioned Spike Lee (who did nothing wrong, as far as I can tell) so many times, but didn't name the agency. Seems to hurt the wrong party's reputation.

Additionally, he has no apparent way to contact him."

and "... What! I think his post does no such thing. Spike Lee did nothing wrong and the post shows nothing but respect for him." Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6811060

Spike Lee literally just said the same thing we said. but when we said, this doesn't seem to have anything to do with spike lee, it's like, cool. But when he says, "this has nothing to do with me" suddenly he's the bad guy.

Just goes to show, if someone accuses you of something, you should apologize for it!! I guess he should have written "I've never met this person in my life...but I'm really sorry about what happened!"

live and learn...

By the way. If anyone here has any problems with anyone...I'm really sorry!

The top comment on a HN post is not a consensus opinion. I saw that post but didn't agree with it, but nor did I downvote it.

I don't think the top comment says what you think it says. It is possible that:

    1. Spike Lee did nothing wrong, AND
    2. Spike Lee bears responsibility

You can complain to a CEO that one of their employees did something wrong, in the course of the employee's duties. The CEO then bears responsibility, even though they may personally have had no part in it.

A top commenter doesn't speak for everyone. Most people were outraged that the designer was ripped off.

Ask HN: Why Does Spike Lee Like To Write Like This?

[Hint: Capitalising Every Word In A Sentence Shows Everyone How Cool And Big You Are]

buT you'vE neveR seeN iT donE backwardS, righT?

My eyes!

FYI -- this seems to be a response to the "Dear Spike Lee" posting @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6811060

Never was much for boycotts, but Spike is making me reconsider.

Can someone quote this response for those of us that have an overly protective firewall at work?

"I Never Heard Of This Guy Juan Luis Garcia,If He Has A Beef It's Not With Me.I Did Not Hire Him,Do Not Know Him.Cheap Trick Writing To Me.YO"

“Why Should I Pay Someone Who I Never Met Nor Had Any Contact With Ever? He Never Made Any Deal With Me. Why Don’t You Pay Me For Your Stupid Text On Thanksgiving Day?”

Am I missing something? The two posters don't look much alike, aside from having a fairly similar trunk in the foreground at the same angle - and I'm guessing that this has something to do with the imagery in the movie.

Yes, the designer's site is down right now but the issue wasn't that the two posters looked alike. It was that Spike Lee posted the actual, unpaid for comps to his Facebook page. Without a contract or even payment the designer should still have exclusive rights to those designs. The Yahoo news article got that part of the story wrong.

Thanks for explaining that. So it's a clear-cut copyright violation.

I hesitate to pile on, but Spike Lee has consistentlty been an ass in public - something I first noticed in an interview many years ago when he was expressing revulsion at the idea that his sister might marry a white man, because black-white marriages were such a terrible idea, in his opinion. Very sad, because I think he's very talented as a filmmaker.

The field the girl in a pink dress running around with the umbrella, and the framing, the type of trunk, the coloring of the internal liner of the trunk, the man climbing out of the trunk are all very similar. On top of that THEN the implication that this was the inspiration from posting the comps...I think Spike Lee and his ad agency is screwed here if they don't settle.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/designer-claims-his-o...

look at the two pictures now.

The least he could do is look into what happened, he has the power to easily do so.

Whatever you might think Spike Lee is, he's certainly predictable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com