Curly Leaves, Common Motifs and Twitters
Summary: A designer created an illustration for her new portfolio site and she was unpleasantly surprised to find a very similar image on a famous social networking site.
A graphic artist named Denise designed a portfolio website to showcase her art and design. She created a "grunge" theme with dark textures and rough lettering and but she felt that the web page header was too bland. Looking around her studio she noticed a house plant (see image) and an idea occurred that she could add some curly leaves in a vector style to the design. She looked at the plant and made a rough sketch (see image) using the leaf shapes of her house plant as a visual resource to create a graceful, visually balanced curving design. She photographed her sketch and imported it into Illustrator, creating a clean vector drawing with six leaves (see image). She imported the illustrator graphic back into Photoshop, applying it to the grunge web page header graphic. After some experimentation she was happy with the result and she published the site. (see image)
A few weeks later Denise decided to enroll in a popular social networking site called Twitter. She set up a profile and she was dismayed to find that one of the available Twitter templates had a leaf design that was uncomfortably similar to her web page header.
Denise knew that it was extremely unlikely that Twitter had stolen her leaf graphic. Her site was new and not heavily visited. Twitter had been popular for years. She was concerned that people might see her website and think that she had stolen the Twitter image or possibly even accuse her of plagiarism and copyright infringement. (see comparison screenshots)
Using copyright terminology, discuss this case study. Did copyright infringement occur here? Is it possible there was unconscious plagiarism? Why or why not?
Assume you are an art director looking at Denise's portfolio in a job interview. You are familiar with the Twitter graphic. You would like to hire her but you cannot take a chance on someone who plagiarises work. How do you proceed?
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