Ya'll ain't Andy Warhol so enough with charging for the soup cans.
Yeah but he did charge, and that is an important point. His SoupCans weren't free if you wanted to buy one. Heck
Roy Lichtenstein copied other comics pretty much verbatim.
While Birgit is using Ikea's (among others) designs, she is neither competing with Ikea, nor is she diluting their trademark. As in the case of Warhol, or SNL doing a Harry Potter skit, the models could reasonably considered a parody and therefore protected under fair use. Plus she is not even calling her stuff Ikea as far as I know. If I made a "subway" looking set and called it "simway" I don't think there is a damn thing subway could do to me, even if I was making money.
I agree Birgit is a twat and all, and she mostly does a disservice to the great designers who designed the objects in the first place. Also she does a disservice to the 3D model sites she originally pirates those meshes from (again - who sell all those same designs and make much higher profit than Birgit) by not taking the time and care to properly transfer them into something usable and nice looking for the game. However, I still don't think Ikea has much of a case. They may contact her and she may just decide to remove it but if she didn't and it came down to push or shove I don't think there is anything Ikea can do.
Again - Phillipe Starks, like many designers such as the Eames, Corbusier, Jacobsen, all their designs knocked off in the actual real world, in furniture where it actually hurts them (ok some of them are dead now - but still). Even Ikea does this - to them! I doubt they really care about any sim furniture. Heck my diningroom chairs the
"Jake" Chairs from Room and Board (a very well know and respected company) and are knockoffs of the
Series 7 Chair by Arne Jacobsen. Neither Jacobsen or Republic of Fritz Hanson who owns the rights get any money from Room and Board and they can't do a damn thing about them selling the obvious copy so long as they don't call it a "Series 7". Yet they are supposed to be able do something about models or sims .packages? I don't think so.
ETA: Stark, personally would not probably care, as he is supposedly "retiring" in two years and apparently regrets designing products that lend toward wasting resources, and I have heard other designs kinda nod he is going off the deep end.
You know what, you're absolutely right. Was Warhol an opportunist, yes. I'm sure we've all been in a faux Corbusier office, have some faux Stark objets d'arts around the house, a Monet poster maybe, the ubiquitous Vuitton handbag, my €10 Armani sunglasses. It's all there, and I have no problems with that. Do the creators of the originals have a right to a problem, oh ya. They can deal with it however they see fit. My problem is the pirater claiming copyright protection, because that's just quite frankly ridiculous. It's one thing to do it, it's another to say you own it.
I don't care if it's Ikea or whatever, just drop the pretense of having created it and getting pissed because someone else is pirating your pirate.
PMBD
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