It's not just flattery, it's a crime

Posted at 2:25 PM on April 21, 2011 by Marianne Combs (1 Comments)
Filed under: Drawing, Printmaking

Adam Turman's artwork, created for a breast cancer campaign

There's an oft-quoted expression that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

Well, local graphic artist Adam Turman would love it if you'd just lay off the flattery, thank you very much.

Turman just found out that a person claiming to be a graphic artist, using the name "Ben Hur," has been selling one of Turman's images on baseball caps and t-shirts. This morning I was able to check out the plagiarist's site myself, and saw Turman's "Second Base" image all over the home page. Here's how Turman explains it:

My partner on the Second Base Breast Cancer campaign, Brian Erba, is well connected in the online poster collecting scene, and randomly patrols for the image I made for the campaign. He came across Ben Hur's stuff, and immediately alerted me to it. I posted about it on FB, sent Zazzle (where he was selling merch) an email, sent Ben Hur an email to his site, sent my lawyer an email, and have been letting everyone know what's going on.

Luckily for Turman, he saw swift results. Hur's site is now down, and all the images have been taken off of his Facebook page and Zazzle. Turman says the best defense is swift communication to as many people as possible, letting them know what's a fake and what's an original.

I've had this happen multiple times before, and it's been my fans, clients, customers, friends, that have really helped to put a stop to this sort of thing. Plagiarizers should know that if they do what they do often enough, it's going to get back to them.

Turman says the worst part of this latest incident is that Ben Hur was stealing art that was used for a not-for-profit campaign.

Stealing work can be flattering to a point, but when that person stealing work uses it for personal gain, it's a totally different ball game (pun intended).

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Comments (1)

Unfortunately there are far too many people that have no problem stealing others works whether art, photos or what have you and passing them off as their own for profit to themselves. It's not just done on Zazzle but anywhere on and off line where items are sold.

Posted by FNolan | April 24, 2011 1:21 PM

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