My childhood copyright infringement trauma
I’d like to tell you a little story about a boy – I shall call him Roland; Roland the Rat – who copied another boy’s drawing. It was for a competition, and I was the primary school kid Roland decided he should pilfer his inspiration from. The drawing I was completing at the time was a montage; a brightly coloured pencil and felt-tip rendering of Man’s achievements, ringed around a central image. Why I’d chosen that particular stylistic route and subject now I couldn’t tell you. Was I just unable to decide which was best, thought “Sod it!” and did them all? Who knows. I guess it’s not really important.
What is important is Roland copied my drawing. I admit, perhaps my own execution and content weren’t up to scratch, but this other boy had grasped the essentials - the style, the theme even - of what I was aiming for and ran with them…straight to his own clean sheet of paper. The git! I was indignant. Of course, being young I didn’t know what being indignant was, heck I didn’t even know the word existed. Trust me, if it wasn’t from the Star Wars universe at the time, it had difficulty appearing on my radar. (On reflection, I’m amazed the Millennium Falcon wasn’t in my picture.)
Now Roland didn’t win that competition, but he did receive a runner-up prize - which was bad enough. I recall even now attending the prize giving ceremony at Trinity Church in my hometown of Llandudno. The outcome was known, the winners had been told what they’d won in advance, so I knew I’d lost. Boy, did I know I’d lost! As if to rub my face in it, the winners pictures were exhibited too at the venue. Ouch! Yet despite this, even now I still recall feeling the vague hope that somehow it had all been mistake, that even then, sitting there glumly with my parents, I still had the chance of being called up and told publically before the audience it had all been a horrible mistake, and handed the prize instead of Roland. After all, hadn’t I done a picture just like his? And done it first?
Alas, that didn’t happen.
This taught me two valuable lessons:
1. Competitions are bunk and their judges don’t know diddly
2. It wasn’t only my maths test answers people were willing to look over my shoulder for.
Alright, I confess I may have let my ego run away with me there, and of course lesson 1 is automatically null and void the moment I win a competition. After all, the executives at Disney clearly knew a good thing when they saw my drawing of the robot, Vincent, and chose me as the prize winner for their Black Hole drawing competition way back when I was only…well, I’ll just leave it at “when I was a kid”.
The point of this whole laboriously told tale is this question:
Were that situation involving grown adults, would the person who drew the original drawing have a case to sue the other for breach of copyright?
That’s why I’m doing this blog. Not to lay to rest my own childhood traumas, I assure you, but to set down the facts about copyright, so you can best protect yourself from the Roland Rats of this world.
(And yes, I hate that glove puppet of the same name.)
© 2006 Julian Boote All rights reserved.
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