Once again I am writing at 3:00 AM.
I am thinking about taking the #inktober challenge. Apparently, the cancel-culture mob went after the person who popularized this hashtag challenge.
The first section of this post just some random thoughts on when and when it is appropriate to copy things and when it is not. The second is about the cancel-culture controversies surrounding #inktober.
On the Art of Reproduction v Plagiarism
It is interesting to note that a thousand years ago scholars were praised for the ability to accurately reproduce the work of others. In an oral society, the ability to remember a work word for word was even more valuable.
Accurately repeating tribal stories was the only way to transmit culture.
Today scholars are openly vilified when their work too closely resembles that of others.
Before continuing, I should point out that I support #hivewatchers and I have joined in on efforts to downvote people who copy and paste text from other sources.
HIVE is a platform that seeks to reward the creation of original content with crypto. The platform needs to aggresively defend against plagiarism.
However, when looking around at society at large, one sees that the ability to accurately replicate work is still both valued and necessary.
For example restaurants pride themselves in producing a consistent fare. Chain restaurants are known to take aggressive steps to assure consistent quality among many restaurants.
Industries often invest billions of dollars in achieving things like ISO certification which assures consistent manufacturing quality.
While schools often punish students for plagiarism, the school system as a whole pushes conformity by forcing to teach a standardized curriculum measured by standardized tests.
I worked for a bit handling legal documents. The legal community wants all of the documents to be uniform. Lawyers tend to cite the same laws in the same way when they practice their dark arts.
Replication plays an interesting role in science. The scientific method demands that scientists produce results that can be replicated. This means that more effort is spent replicating experiments than in creating new and original experiments.
The Science Lab at college often presents students with experiments where everyone is expected to get the same results.
We appear to be in a schizophrenic world where sometimes people are attacked for copying things and other times praised for the ability.
The problem doesn't seem that strange to me. Some situations require originality. Some require consistency.
Customers would be unhappy if the local diner served up plates of original content each day ... meaning that the customer would never know what to expect from the food. People on HIVE want to see content produced by real humans.
I am attracted to HIVE specifically because it is a community seeking to fund original works.
Now lets get to the post.
I've been thinking about trying my hand at the #inktober challenge. This challenge asks people to draw a picture a day for a month. I discovered a few years ago that I lost the ability to write legibly and to draw.
In researching #inktober, I discovered that the cancel-culture mob has been going after Jake Parker who started the hashtag challenge in 2016.
Apparently, Mr. Parker committed the sin of trying to find ways to monetize the challenge.
His first egregious act was that he hired a Law Firm to help protect the branded trademark of the firm.
Apparently there was a growing number of people and entities who were selling works using the InkTober brand.
The IP lawyers went after some popular Youtube channels that were competing for the #InkTober hashtag. This led to a great deal of ill will.
Mr Parker claims that he only wanted the IP law firm to go after people using the brand to sell products.
It is an interesting question: How should one go about defending a brand in the Internet Age.
The video below will talk about a second sin committed by Mr. Parker.
Apparently, Mr. Parker hoped to cash in on the InkTober Brand by selling a book that taught basic drawing techniques.
Another Youtube artist claims that Parker plagiarized parts of his introduction to drawing book.
The video I displayed below is by a knife wielding Youtube creator who provides a balanced examination of the plagiarism charges.
I found the controversy interesting because there have been thousands of books about drawing dating back to Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528). I suspect that there were thousands of handcrafted manuscripts about the art of inking before the invention of publishing.
Inking is an ancient art. Artists learn good drawing style by repeating basic exercises. Creating an introduction to drawing books is largely a matter of creating an arrangement of basic exercises.
I remember that there was a whole section at the library filled with books on how to draw. They all had the same basic exercises.
Introduction to drawing books are likely to be similar.
Parker did a good job of documenting the process used in creating his introduction to drawing book. But I am not sure if it stopped the mob's effort to cancel #inktober.
The video is interesting because it is critical of both authors and at the mob reaction.
I will also add a picture from one of Durer's books on drawing human anatomy. This was from Wikicommons He is one of my favorite Renaissance authors. He not only wrote some of the first art books. Durer was one of the creators who figured out how to print art in books.
Hi, @yintercept and @vagabondspirit. I've read your Inktober posts with great interest. Would you be interested in working with the Creative Coin Fund on Inktober? There are some supports we could offer, perhaps a large delegation to vagabondspirit (again), and a channel on the Creative Coin Discord. We could also offer CCC prizes, perhaps weekly. You could write posts (weekly? daily?), organize contests, promote the event from the @cccf account. Or maybe you would prefer to operate from @vagabondspirit, and we can just support you with a delegation, prize money, and larger platform. The main thing would be to make Creative Coin the center for Inktober (not POB). You can reply here or on Discord: cliffagreen#1444.