Number 19

This is just a rant. A rumbling of thoughts. It’s not necessarily logical, or thought out- I’m just… wondering, thinking ‘out loud’ as I write. Writing out loud I guess.

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An issue people talk about a lot these days is copyright. About original ideas, stealing ideas, copying, crediting ideas, crediting inspiration, crediting… everything. People are concerned about where ideas and inspiration come from. They’re concerned with their ideas being copied, and people making money from them. This isn’t really a new issue- people have been copying other people for centuries. For probably as long as people have been making stuff, other people have been copying them.

Maybe the problem is just the internet? If I go to France and I see an awesome idea for a necklace, then I come home and making something similar to sell at my local market, or in my online store, that French seller can see what I’ve made because of my blog, or facebook, or other people posting on their blogs or facebook. If I had of done that 20 years ago, that seller in France never would have know.

There’s the question of “should copy other people’s ideas or not”, and then there’s the question of “can we even HELP but copy other people’s ideas?”.

What is an original idea? Something you’ve thought of yourself, right? But what about ALL the things around you that might possibly contribute to your idea? The sky is an awesome shade of blue today, so you mix some colours and put it on your canvas. Your colour choice wasn’t completely your own, was it? Even if you thought the colour of the sky was a nice blue, it just needed a touch more green to make it perfect, you’ve still taken the sky colour and changed it. You’ve added onto something that already exists. I know this seems like a bit of a silly argument, but I feel sometimes like things are getting this way.

When does something move from being one person’s original idea, to such a widely used technique that it’s fair game for anyone. This question is kinda a big deal in nearly ever field I imagine, but particularly in the areas where you have to create things, and particularly in the crafting world, because so many people are online sharing ideas.

To put all of this into context, here’s an example:

I’ve recently been working on a scrapbooking layout that uses concertina folds to hold heaps of photos (see photo below).

Is this an original layout? I certinaly thought about it myself, and came up with it. Originally I had planned to do a big grid, but when I ended up with too many photos for the grid, I tried a few other techniques, until deciding on this one. The concertina idea I first did here, as part of an online challenge. As with a lot of challenges, I scrap-lifted the entire page. That’s what we were meant to do. But once I’d done that was the technique mine to adapt, change, and use? Or was I scrap-lifting that part of the layout again? All over the interwebs now there are dozens of concertina style scrapbooking pages. Was this an original idea from the person who created the challenge?

When I first started this layout, before I started thinking about this, I considered this conertina style a tool in my scrapbooking toolkit. It’s a technique that I plan to use over and over, because it’s an effective way of including way more photos than you can normally fit on a page. But as I started to think about copying etc. I wondered if this was an okay layout. Okay for my personal album, sure, but okay to show on my blog? Okay to submit to a magazine? To what point should I give credit for ideas and inspiration? This layout is considerably different to the one I first saw this technique on. Are techniques okay to copy? At what point does it happen that so many people use this technique it can’t be credited to one person anymore. And like I say above, do I even know that the person who created the layout I saw it off had the original idea? Maybe they saw it on someone else’s page, who knows?!

I guess none of this is important if it’s just in my own album, but when if someone admires this page, and asks me to teach the layout at their local scrapbooking shop. So I go there, and I get paid to show everyone how to make this layout. Should I give credit back to where I first saw the concertina idea, where I first saw a page with four blocks, where I first saw little strips of paper on the sides of photos, where I first saw someone ink the edges of the paper? What if that source isn’t online? Should I saw I learnt about inking edges from a lady, I can’t remember her name, her taught us some cardmaking about 5 years ago?

Or is this page far enough removed from the original layouts I saw all those techniques on that I can safely call it my own. Who’s to say as well that I didn’t just think of this idea myself? Say I did, and I submitted this layout to a magaine, and I didn’t credit anyone. I just made up every single element myself. Then someone sees this and thinks “Hey! I have a layout that has four conertina boxes on it! You must have copied my layout and just removed one of the boxes!”. Umm… no. But who’s to know who created the original idea. Who even cares?

I guess all this thinking out loud leads me to the conclusion that when we make stuff, we need to accept that there are no original ideas. Someone in the world has probably aready thought of it and done it before. It may be an original idea to you, yes, but to everyone? Maybe not. Maybe we’re too worried about copying and copyright and crediting people. On the other hand, maybe I’m not taking this serious enough. It’s okay for ME to say that it doesn’t matter- my creative ideas aren’t my livelyhood. What about the person who rellies of people buying their unique products so that they can pay their bills, and eat.

Is there a happy medium? Is there a line in the sand so we all know when what we’re doing is acceptable, and when it’s not acceptable? Maybe a percentage?