Inktober Book Plagerism Accusations
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People are vicious right now... If you take a neutral or with any hint of taking JP’s view, people just attack you and say “Did you watch Alphonso’s entire video?” This is ridiculous, I can say the same thing to Alphonso: “Did you read Jake’s entire book before publicly defaming him over pen&ink concepts you did not invent?”
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I work in the medical field and almost all the medical textbooks have very similar order of presenting and explaining disease entities. In pathology, for example, it is most often: Epidemiology -> Clinical presentation/symptoms -> Pathologic findings -> Prognosis. Authors don’t accuse of each other for presenting concepts with similar titles in the same order, that would be farcical! It’s plagiarism if you copied sentences word for word and rip off the exact same image from another book/article. It would be narcissistic to think that once you’ve published on a topic, no one else should publish on the same topic. That’s like saying artists don’t have their own personal unique point of view to bring to the same topic. So why keep writing love songs when there are thousands of those already...
But I have to voice my concern that will not be popular on this forum: is it at all possible Jake pushed out this book too quickly without enough research to see if there may be risks of plagiarism accusations?... -
@Marta-Kitka yeah it’s like:”don’t send an email when you are angry”
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@pixel-dsp I don't think this is an unpopular question only because Jake Parker seems to have gone through the trouble of crediting people in his book. We just haven't seen that yet. Alphonso Dunn (afaik because I couldn't watch the entire 57 minutes of his video) seems to be coming from a place where he thinks he invented much of this stuff. If Jake Parker has been teaching this so long and is confident about where his book fits in the tradition of teaching inking methods, then I don't see why he wouldn't make a regular publisher deadline on it to coincide with Inktober.
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There are a number of issues being discussed here, though related they are quite different.
The issue of plagiarism on the layout of a book by cherry picking or accessing a couple pages is ludicrous. there are only so many ways to layout graphics and in any visual book you can find similarities. Until the entire book can be compared there is no way to say if the look and layout was copied.
As for the topic/steps/mechanics of inking, these terms, demo's/examples and tools have been universal for many lifetimes. My instructors in college were world level artists and far removed from jake. They used the same examples shown in the pages shown. It's ridiculous to think one person owns any method that has been used for generations.
The gentleman on youtube has acted out like too many on social media and online, react and attack. what happened to thought and discussion? I can't say legally who is right as I am not an attorney or expert but using common sense clarifies it in my mind.
As for sites cancelling "inktober", don't come down on them without knowing their reasons. They could just be tools who are reactionary or they may simply want to avoid any issues with using a trademarked word. trademark is far different than copyrights. A trademark owner is required to defend their trademark or risk losing it and/or having it enter public domain. While a trademark owner may be willing to accept loose enforcement and let the mark be used - attorneys and publishers are not so willing to be nice. When Inktober was trademarked the owner I am sure realized, or should have realized, not only would there be flack over registering what what others were encouraged to use but that there would be damage to that brand that would affect participation. the phrase went from being a community activity to an activity that was owned (in name only but owner nonetheless). I'm not so sure the trademark would have been granted had opposition been submitted during the filing period with clear examples of the history of the phrase.
It is disheartening to see artists, who are supposed to open and willing to explore openly attack Jake the way they are. I guess I wrongly believed that creative people were the type to not jump to conclusions.
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@jimsz I guess I'm confused... My understanding is that Jake owns the copyright and trademark to Inktober. The sites mentioned had contractual deals set up months in advance with Jake/Inktober to either do activities that dovetailed into this year's Inktober activities (Jake and DeviantArt had announced the first ever Inktober awards with DeviantArt months ago) or were events cosponsored by Inktober (the Lightbox Expo). Both sites have clearly decided to distance themselves from Jake and Inktober altogether, which is understandable considering this issue will probably take months to figure out, but still very disappointing as they did so before Jake even released his public statement. Last year there was a giant frackas when Jake legally started enforcing his trademark because (as I understood it) he had to or he'd lose it, plus he had this book deal in the works. The art community went ballistic as they lost something they felt they were entitled to. This incident has simply added more fuel for their torches.
I completely agree it's frustrating to see artists attack each other so swiftly, but it has been my personal observation by looking at the majority of the accounts doing the disparaging (because I've been quite carefully determining who to block from my own accounts) that around half of them seem to have between 5-50 followers, both on Instagram and Twitter. They seem to be younger, early-stage artists who may not fully understand what they saw when they watched Mr. Dunn's video comparison. I take solace in that.
It's also apparent to me that 1) there might be a lot of "trash talk" accounts artists are using to cut down others to keep their anonymity as the number of posts they've made seem very limited, and 2) a lot of non-artists may be jumping on the bandwagon (based on the content of their feeds), which just feels... depressing for the state of society in general...
I may be coming across as a little creepy and stalker-ey but it has been incredibly satisfying to just simply Blockety-Block-Block the more radical and "expressive" commenters as well as some of the very small handful of established artists that have been around long enough to know better... It does my heart and my sanity a little good... Ahem.
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@Coreyartus I have to admit I didn’t fully understand the issue around JP trademarking Inktober, so what I say may be out of place. But in my mind, JP did create inktober and he has the right to legally protect this logo. Why do people feel entitled to freely use other creators’ logo? It’s a logo! Do people think they can freely slap FedEx logo on their artwork while complaining people ask them to make art for free?...
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@Lee-White Thank you for sharing this post and some of the evidence.
@Jake-Parker You've inspired so many artists and contributed so much to this community and the larger art community. Keep your chin up and keep up the great work!
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@davidhohn thank you for the links. I am discovering the cancellation culture and Evyan Whitney's story educated me about the origin of call out actions.
That said, I can't reconcile what first was a way for activists to make themselves heard on the behalf of silenced minorities and what is happening in Alphonso/Jake case, which looks (to me) more to be a public trial without presumption of innocence (which is the foundation of the legal system in France, where I am coming from).
I am very puzzled about all this and I suspect I am also lacking references to fully grasp the contextual and cultural components, which transformed what was originally a dispute between two artists, into a social online action.
I will step back from this thread to think of it. Thank you for those who, by sharing their opinion, enlighted me about the cancel culture..
I am just hoping now that the two protagonists will solve the issue quickly and the consequences of it won't be as awful as it seems to be now on a reputational and business standpoint, but also for the sake of the art community.
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@pixel-dsp I know right? My guess is that if they already have products with the Inktober logo then they’d have to stop selling them or atleast find a way to remove the logo from the product. This is a more reasonable reason. Another theory of mine is that they feel their inktober artwork won’t feel geniune if they can’t use the logo which is just ridiculous. They can still make inktober art. They can still sell products for inktober. They just can’t use the official logo which is totally fine if you ask me.
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I came across this on Instagram where someone out of nowhere told me the Inktober book was a copy. I don’t know Jake personally but being an avid listener of the podcast, I feel I got the gist of Jake’s personality and immediately thought “That doesn’t sound like something Jake would do”. So I asked the commenter for clarification and all I got was a link to Alphonso’s Instagram account. I figured it was a troll issue and didn’t bother following up.
Then I see this thread and yowza! While I haven’t watched the video and don’t care to, like most of the replies here said, you can’t copyright drawing techniques. As for The rest of the content, similarities happen.
How did Alphonso get the book? I don’t think it has been released yet, or am I wrong?
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@danielerossi Dunn has not seen the book. He is basing his argument on the handful of pages on the preorder site and a handful more from Jake’s Instagram.
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@danielerossi Dunn based his claims on the preview pages of the book on amazon. Imagine accusing someone based on 2 pages, without even reading the whole book.
Portfolio: nyrrylcadiz.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nyrryl_cadiz/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbJCF1Im8ZO7hpGWTKOJMuA -
@Nyrryl-Cadiz What? That is indeed ridiculous. Alphonso should have indeed gone directly to Jake first. Thanks for clearing that up (you, too @deboraht ).
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Yep, totally ridiculous!
I love Jake's reply to it on his Instagram. So professional! Stay patient Mr.Jake!I am optimistic about this. I'm wondering if this might turn out to be a good thing for the art community!?
Visualizing something good.
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In my art community where I’m enrolled in a mentor ship course, I brought up this topic for discussion. Someone immediately said “this would be an instance of a popular white artist ripping off a lesser known black artist...how many times have we heard this same story before.”
I didn’t how to respond to that... Any ideas? -
Jake is one of the most creative and original artists I’ve ever seen. It is sad to see all the negative comments about Jake but at the same time it is very encouraging that many are still supporting Jake and are not rushing to judge. It is tempting to jump in to defend Jake on the negative social media comments but there are too many individuals to address. It’s unfortunate that the accuser did not reach out in a private manner instead of opening a public case on the Internet against Jake.
I look forward to Jake’s future responses about the accusation and I hope it is proven quickly that the accusations are false.
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@pixel-dsp Maybe,..."At this point in time, there's simply no proof of that!" And that's a fact!
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@pixel-dsp it's not entirely true that Alphonso Dunn is lesser-known, he has 644k followers on YouTube, Jake only has 167k. Jake has a bigger following on Instagram but less overall.
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@pixel-dsp ah! That's exactly what I meant in my previous comment and why I don't feel qualify to comment further. But let me give some clarification :
We are prisonners of our biases and cultural references. For me, as an European, I only read a dispute between two artists. Maybe this is because of my education and culture, maybe it is because of the white priviledge, a concept that I wasn't familiar with until recently, as it got popularised through US social medias (and which is an interesting concept to reflect on, don't get me wrong on that!)
If you bring a social and cultural frame into the picture, the story can be read differently :
-the black artist vs. the white artist;
-the perhaps poor artist who still struggles with a day job and self-publishes his books vs. the presumably rich professionnal artist who is supported by a publishing company;
-the less known artist vs. the famous artist;
Etc.(Edit : these are exemples of interpretation, I don't know anything about Alphonso's or Jake's private and business situations).
All is cumulative and does not exclude one another. This add layers and layers of complexicity. In the context of Black Lives Matter, this is all the most sensitive.
If I were you, I would ask your student to think in terms of his own bias and context, and how much does it weight on his reasonning. Assuming Jake pladgiarised Alphonso's book (for which there is no expert view yet, nor opinion from a neutral party mandated by the artists), isn't he giving some intention to Jake that Jake didn't have? Beside is there some interest from some activists on the Internet to politicise the dispute?
I assume the artists are American and most of their followers are as well. As a non US person, my impression is that the reaction of the people is exacerbated by the current context. Also as a non-US person, I am probably not the best person to analyse the situation and don't want to cause contreversy on the forum. My place is more of an observant. So, if you came this far to read this, please consider it for what it is : a mere thought as I am trying to understand the situation, and not an invitation to debate politics on the forum, which is - to me - not the best place to do so.
