Artistic Etiquette: When is it okay to not credit a concept artist?
greentooth
My answer to this question would be: Never.
If I had to organize my preferences into tiers, it'd look like this:
If I had to organize my preferences into tiers, it'd look like this:
Ideal: 3D artist credits the concept artist alongside their own name in the watermark of the image
Okay: 3D artist credits the concept artist in the description everywhere they post it
Bad: 3D artist says they worked from a concept, but doesn't say who made it
Garbage: 3D artist doesn't outright state they worked from someone else's concept at all
(Bonus points: 3D artist asked permission first)
That's all well and good, but the reason I raise the question in the topic is that I routinely see people here falling into the "bad" tier because they harvested unsourced art from pinterest and decided to use it without credit. This, to me, is not an acceptable excuse.
Though I've labeled this the "bad", I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about this behavior. I don't think anyone has bad intentions (usually), the unfortunate fact is that Pinterest is a good place to find art, and a fucking awful place to find out who made it. Still, however understandable it may be, I feel that it sets a poor precedent when claiming ignorance (even when legitimate) is an acceptable excuse to use someone else's work for your own benefit without giving them any due credit.
How do the rest of you feel about this?
Edit: Also this is not about professional work. Since professional work can safely be assumed to be a team effort most of the time and sometimes it isn't very practical to credit everybody (though I always enjoy it when I see people do it anyway) and there are other ways to find out who worked on the project.
Though I've labeled this the "bad", I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about this behavior. I don't think anyone has bad intentions (usually), the unfortunate fact is that Pinterest is a good place to find art, and a fucking awful place to find out who made it. Still, however understandable it may be, I feel that it sets a poor precedent when claiming ignorance (even when legitimate) is an acceptable excuse to use someone else's work for your own benefit without giving them any due credit.
How do the rest of you feel about this?
Edit: Also this is not about professional work. Since professional work can safely be assumed to be a team effort most of the time and sometimes it isn't very practical to credit everybody (though I always enjoy it when I see people do it anyway) and there are other ways to find out who worked on the project.
Replies
Stupid thing is, you can actually tag a lot of file formats with meta-data, but a lot of websites like imgur strip that in the name of reducing the size of the image.
These guys are trying to do something about that through various means. There's also things like reverse image search: https://saucenao.com/ (Basically, stick in an image, and get who made it)
Maybe others also have tools for this?
Personally, I prefer seeing credit in a written description, instead of on the image itself. Maybe both, but I feel like the less text on the image, the better, for the most part. Also, if the concept artist wants to google search his/her name, it's far more likely to come up if it's written in plain text on a website, than if it's watermarked on an image.
Personally, I prefer seeing credit in a written description, instead of on the image itself
I'd disagree. While text can indeed "take away" from an image, at the end of the day this is pretty much the price to pay for for using someone else's work as a base, and it is the least one can do to promote the original artist who otherwise would go completely unnoticed especially if the picture is reblogged/shared. I think it is only fair - and of course the edits should be added in the description too.
I also strongly believe that this should be the case for photo studies too.
Fan art of widely known IPs is different. For these I'd say that a note in the description field is fine.
That said, the only time i get pissed off is when they don't mention the concept art, or say its their design or whatever. I would like to think that any smart artist would sign their concepts that they put online, so that if people just show the concept, without saying who, people can see know who did it.
That is not even remotely what I am saying. What I am talking about is working directly from an artists concepts without providing them credit. As in, you found a concept on pinterest, then made a 3D model that was a direct copy (or close copy) of the concept, and did not credit them because the source was not provided.
There's nothing stopping you from making your own concept and working off it. But that requires putting in the same effort, time, skill, that the person making the original concept did.
That said, reverse image search like TinEye make it fairy easy to find the original artist, it just takes some time.
I'm a fan of what you've dubbed as the "Okay" scenario, mainly because it's searchable. I also like when people add it to the end of their video, or at the start, but I'd expect it less from a static image.
Do you guys have any experience with contacting concept artists for permission? I'd be interested in hearing stories of how it went. I've tried before but got silence.
Thanks for pointing that out!