BENGALURU: Copycats abound in every alley and bylane of our lives. We thrive on the easy access they provide us to things we could otherwise never afford in their original forms. Cheap versions of unpronounceable brands, China-made phones with logos intact, plagiarised love letters — we have them all. Art too often succumbs, sometimes to blatant copying and other times, to subtle degrees of the same.
In the world of art, there is but a fine line between an absolute rip-off and a tiny tweak that can pass as one’s own creation. Under copyright laws, an artist has the exclusive rights to an original work; which means the right to decide how that work is used. The tricky part is that copyright protects only the artwork and not the idea behind it.
For instance, in 1984, a magazine commissioned the American artist, Andy Warhol to create artwork for their article using an original photograph of the singer Prince, taken in 1981 by Lynn Goldsmith, after due credits were given to her for single time usage. Warhol created 16 images out of which one was chosen.
After the artist’s death in 1987, the rights to these images went to the Andy Warhol Foundation. Years later in 2016, when the magazine used another from these images after paying the Foundation, Goldsmith was completely ignored. Litigation followed and it was concluded that Warhol did infringe on Goldsmith’s copyright. Does that then mean that all the Mona Lisa and Ravi Varma copies adorning a million walls are criminal in nature? Certainly not, if one goes by the law.
Artwork is only protected for 70 years after the artist’s death. Many of them, like the above-mentioned, are in the public domain. With more recent artworks, most often the artist’s estate holds the copyrights. For instance, if you wanted to copy a painting by Picasso that was on display in a museum, you would have to get the permission of the Picasso estate and not the museum.
In India however, copyright laws have never been seriously implemented. Proactive measures to safeguard one’s creativity are hardly in place and artists are mostly ignorant or unassertive of their rights and the legal steps that can be taken in case of a violation.
The consolation that remains is that ultimately what matters in art is originality. No amount of perfection in reproducing can earn one the glory one so desperately chases. Packaging another’s idea with one’s own resources may seem the easiest way to proclaim artistic skills, but such art will fail the test of time, for how can the birth of a splendid vision ever be copied in its truest form?