TEKNIDERMY - ISSUE 8: February/March 2002
What's
Wrong with Ripping?
by
Kenray
Part of being a creative person is the ability to use one's imagination to a great extent. If you have made it to these pages, we will accept that you have a fairly good measure of active imagination. So, put it to use with me for a moment...
Imagine this:
The year is 1934. You are invited to the opening party for Pablo Picasso's "Guernica". You attend this gala affair, and find the enormous painting on a wall in a fantastic Spanish villa. The room is full of press and glitterati.
You walk up to the painting, pull a sharpie marker from your pocket, and draw a big bushy set of eyebrows on the bull prominently figured in the painting. You then turn to the assembled crowd and proudly announce, "Behold my new creation, GuerniKa!"
Mr. Picasso would most likely walk over to you, grab you by the neck, and throttle you to death. No one would fault him for doing so, in light of your incredibly asinine behavior. No court would charge him for your death.
You violated Mr.
Picasso's work, and he killed you for it.
No problem... it's Spain in 1934.
Now, accepting your big imagination, you are probably thinking that this preposition is absurd, and that no one would have ever dared to walk up to "Guernica", deface it, and then claim the entire work as their own.
It is preposterous; it is absurd, and it happens all the time.
These days, we call the act "ripping". It comes in many forms: the all out copy-paste of some artists website layout, the "re-branding" of a program interface, the "lifting" of certain images from websites, and more.
And why is this such an issue in the skinning community? The theory of your humble author is this: being creative, and putting your work on the web makes you highly sensitive to the subject of plagiarism.
Most skinners do not make their art for large corporations or fat paychecks. Their only "great reward" is the gratitude, respect and recognition of their peers. When theses artists are plagiarized, their only form of "pay" is stolen. And if you are making art yourself, it's easy to empathize with the victim...
Which brings us to the subject of "OS Ports".
Briefly, an "OS Port" is what you get when someone takes the default interface of an operating system (like MacOSX or Windows XP), copies it, and then uses the images from the operating system to create skins.
Are "OS Ports" rips? Technically, yes. Any skin in which the art has been taken from another artist's work is a "port" and any "port" that has not been authorized by the owner/creator of the original art is a Rip.
So why is there no great outcry in the skinning community to have "OS Ports" removed from the skin sites?
Well, it comes back to the nature of the author, as it were. Most skinners are the person described above - they are not large corporations with multi billion dollar holdings. Apple and Microsoft are. And that seems to make all the difference in the "ethics of skinning".
It is okay to rip art from the new Apple OS or the new Microsoft OS because they are rich beyond all comprehension, and besides, the ports are only "advertisements" for the products they sell, right? Why on earth should they complain that some kid wants to make his Windowblinds skin out of their art?
Now, if we are to examine this concept completely, we must take it to the logical conclusion:
If some skinners were rich, it would be okay to rip them, too.
Some weeks back, it was widely reported that an unaffiliated website had ripped the site layout from the Pixtudio website, and was using it without permission. A great hue and cry was raised, many mails were sent to the site operator and (thankfully) the rippers relented and the rip was removed.
Now, ask yourself this: if Pixtudio were a multi-million dollar corporation, would there have been such outrage? Or would the same "OS Port" mentality that pervades our ethics have applied to the situation? You bet yer buns.
If Pixtudio were a world-renowned corporation with billions of dollars in the bank, there would not have been one single complaint about ripping them. Heck, you might even find a collection of Pixtudio rips on some skin site under the generic heading of "OS Ports".
(by the way...this author will continue to hope that Pixtudio does become a multimillion-dollar global corporation... so that this hypothesis can be put to the test -wink, wink.)