Back in 2015, Norwegian photographer Stig Håvard Dirdal captured a creative Christmas photo that went viral online. He was recently surprised when he came across a poster for a Russian movie that looked a little too familiar.
In 2014, curator Simon Njami engaged Ethiopian artist photographer Aïda Muluneh to interpret Dante’s Inferno for an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art entitled The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists. Muluneh’s “The 99 Series” featured a model set against a light grey mottled background, with her body and face covered in white paint, and her hands dipped in red.
It often happens that other photographers have a similar shot to yours. Especially in landscape photography, where there are lots of amazing locations where a lot of photographers go. Having a similar shot is often not really a problem -- most of the time these shots are still different because of light, conditions, and different compositions from the same spot.
Back in 2016, photographer Jairo Melara of the Los Angeles-based photography company Fifth District did a photo shoot of a model wearing roller skates at Venice Beach. Melara says he was surprised earlier this year when the band Gorillaz released its music video for the song "Humility" that features a strangely similar look and feel.
At what point does something go beyond inspiration? Edward McGowan is a California based photographer who has an interesting situation in his hands.
Remember the StikBox? The creative smartphone case selfie stick raised over $40K on Kickstarter for a product that would eventually cost about $47. But before the Kickstarter was even over, China was selling a perfect copy for as little as 8 bucks.
Getting your work copied, ripped off and/or stolen is a sad reality in the digital age. In fact, earlier this year we shared a website dedicated to ousting copycats and were shocked at how much copyright infringement was really out there. But where finding your work on another "photographer's" website would be startling enough, how would you feel if you found it while browsing a major art show?
Singer Bob Dylan is being accused of plagiarism after several paintings in his recent art show were found to have "striking resemblances" to works by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Léon Busy. An example is Dylan's painting titled Opium (above left), which appears to be directly copied from Busy's Vietnam (above right). A Flickr user also found that Dylan had copied six photographs -- one of which an artificial Photoshop edit -- from his Flickr stream.