Plagiarism Today’s Jonathan Bailey takes a look at trademark, copyright and how it applies to logos and logo design. Part of a series on understanding intellectual property rights and how to protect yours.
To hear intellectual property attorneys describe it, it seems so simple. Copyright covers creative works of expression fixed into a tangible medium of expression. Trademark covers business names, slogans and other items used to identify it in the marketplace. Patent covers ideas and inventions. Simple.
Then what about logos?
Logos are one of those spaces of intellectual property law where there is a great deal of overlap between two areas, in this case copyright and trademark, and businesses are known for using both to protect their logos from undesired use.
So where are the lines drawn? The answers aren’t very simple and requires looking deeper into what copyright and trademark protect and, even then, there aren’t very many clear answers to give, just a lot of gray area that has to be taken one case at a time.
Trademark and Logos
When most people think of intellectual property and logos, they leap to trademark and for good reason. Trademark is about protecting things that identify a business in the marketplace and logos are among the most important means of identification. As such, logos are generally protected by trademark and enforceable as such.
Logo design contests and their host sites are marketed to clients as presenting ‘lots of choice’ from their huge ‘communities’. Trouble is, many of the design ‘choices’ are toxic, and many of the ‘community’ members are unrepentant plagiarists. Sadly, sometimes they even win.
I’m so sick of this crap that I’m almost loathe to write this post, but yeah, it’s the damn boat logo again. No, not the last time. Or the time before that. These are new ones. In case you’re new to the blog, or missed our earlier screeds, let me sum things up. The ‘damn boat logo’ is an old design from our portfolio (added to our site about seven years ago) that’s been repeatedly cribbed and entered into dozens of logo design contests. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, it’s probably not the best boat logo in the world, but it is among the top searches on Google when someone searches for “boat + logo”. Happens so often, it’s become a running joke at the shop and around the blog. It has, around our studio anyway, become the poster child for everything that’s wrong with logo design contests, spec work and crowdsourcing. Even made a page entitled Again with the damn boat logo to illustrate some of the more blatant examples. Keep in mind that I never write about boat logo knock-offs that are merely similar (which are legion) but logos that are identical in some fashion, clearly traced from the original. If I can’t ‘reverse engineer’ the logo from the contest entry exactly, then I don’t carp about it. See, there’s more than enough carbon copies available, and I’m loathe to muddy the discussion with examples that are ‘close’ and might need some explanation. Take the entry above, entered into a logo contest on 99designs a couple of days ago. Of course, it looks ‘like’ the original. But that’s not all. It is, as the image below demonstrates, a blatant knock-off that’s been rotated a few degrees. To whit:
Looks like it’s the boat logo again. This time on Crowdspring. That makes two in one day.
Gotta be some sort of record.
Another day. Another 99designs contest. Again with the damn boat logo.
Folks, this stopped being funny a while ago.
As evidenced by features on NPR and in Forbes, spec work, crowdsourcing and design contests remain the darlings of the business media. Sadly, many of the inflated claims made are left unchallenged and become the accepted truth, when often times, they’re not really true at all.
Conversations about spec work and crowdsourcing have turned up in a few media places the last few days, so figured we might as well take a look at what’s what, and offer up our usually dissenting two cents worth. The first was an NPR interview with Crowdspring co-founder Mike Samson, hosted by Bob Garfield as part of his On The Media show. You can listen at the link (also includes a transcript). Nothing terribly earth-shattering, more of a typical puff-piece and glorified press release for Crowdspring. Trouble is, many claims made on the show, some of them quite debatable, are left unchallenged, so thought it might be worthwhile if we took the liberty of, well, challenging them. Fly in the ointment and all that. Don’t want to seem like I’m bagging on Samson, but this sort of stuff happens when the media conflates the issue of crowdsourcing and design contests, with the companies that host them. Having got all that out of the way, let’s begin with the rationale for the show:
BOB GARFIELD: When I wrote my most recent book about the chaos created by the digital revolution, I, of course, needed a cover. In the spirit of my subject matter, I crowdsourced the project through an online site called crowdSPRING.com. More than a hundred designers from around the world took on the project, and the winner got 500 dollars, plus the glory of illustrating The Chaos Scenario.
Glory of illustrating The Chaos Scenario you say? Some glory. When the author of the book hosts a radio show that extols the virtue of crowdsourcing and Crowdspring, and talks about the book cover project itself, he neglects to mention the designer’s name? For the record, the winner of Garfield’s book cover is a designer who no longer participates in Crowdspring contests, but now works for the company as one supposes, a salaried employee. Make of that what you wish.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, digital tools have made your business something like an inevitability, just like the steam engine made mass production of, say, shoes an inevitability. But the Industrial Revolution also spelled very [LAUGHS] bad news for cobblers, the shoemakers who were basically priced out of the market.MIKE SAMSON: When shoes could be mass produced, all of a sudden many, many, many more people had access to high-quality footwear, and the quality of their life was improved. CrowdSPRING, and platforms like crowdSPRING, provide the same function in a more modest way for the consumers, the buyers of creative services.
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