A Complete Coincidence.
A few months ago, one of my students approached me with an image of his and an advertisement produced in Dubai; he was sure the image was copied for the advertisement. I showed the two images side by side to many people, including reps and a few legal experts in the field and they were convinced that it had been copied. I then wrote the AD on his behalf and asked for him to give us an explanation as to why he used it as a comp or copied it and asked him to contact my student to discuss compensation.
He wrote back and said that it was an amazing coincidence, but he had never seen the image before, and in fact, Flickr (where we had assumed the image had been taken from) is banned in Media City where the agency is located in Dubai. There are, of course, a few different workarounds to bypassing the censorship of Flickr. However, once the AD presented us with the image he actually did use as inspiration, an image from the Guinness Book of World Records featuring the ‘most cigarettes smoked at once,’ it better matches the arrangement of toothbrushes in their model’s mouth than does my student’s. I also emailed the photographer to ask him if my student’s photo was used as a comp and the photographer confirmed that it had not been used.
A complete coincidence.
Student's Photograph
Agency's Photograph
One Response to “A Complete Coincidence.”
Lauren says:
July 9, 2010 at 3:54 pm
These don’t look very similar to me at all. The ad has a distinct pattern in the way the toothbrushes are arranged. Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen quite a few incarnations of this concept with different materials. There was an episode of Community last season where one of the characters had a bunch of pencils shoved in his mouth just like this. It’s hubris to think any of our ideas are truly original.