The latest scandal to be released by AKB48 sees Minami Takahashi uncovered passing off “blatantly plagiarised” art as her own copyrighted logo designs.
Various official AKB48 logos “designed by Minami Takahashi” and featuring on AKB sites and goods have been identified as bearing an uncanny resemblance to images pulled off the Internet, the first case being the uncannily appropriate choice of a pirate ship taken from a stock photo site:
A circus, also appropriately enough, featured next:
The AKB48 editions are marked “© Takamina,” whilst the various sites they are apparently appropriated from bear dire legal warnings about just this sort of misappropriation.
Shortly after the issue surfaced, the AKB imagery quietly began to be revised to bear less of a resemblance:
Her supposed artistic prowess was also featured on TV, but again doubts arose:
Online there is not faith in her talents or integrity evident:
“A perfect match…”
“Time for the usual tearful apology I think.”
“Will she shave herself for us?”
“They’ve already started sneakily swapping out the art though…”
“Plagiarism is the worst. What is she, Chinese?”
“Are you all crazy! It’s a galleon, they all look alike!”
“It does bear a resemblance to sometihng out of One Piece.”
“The ship is completely out. As for the tent…”
“I could forgive the boat, but the wave as well is a bit much.”
“I think she may have actually drawn the frog from the photo herself though.”
“Is tracing really that bad? Mangaka do it all the time.”
“At least combine parts from multiple works to cover it up…”
“It is a bit much to be putting their stolen designs on goods and selling them to fans.”
“I didn’t think she’d survive the arrest of her mother, but this time it is hard to see her continuing.”
“Aren’t they ashamed to be trotting out a sex criminal’s daughter on TV still?”
“They managed to get Google to drop all mention of that from their autosuggest too…”
“Did anyone really think any of these incompetents could draw or actually do anything?”
“I think they’ll just ignore it this time.”
“How do they find this stuff in the first place…”
Another bunch of retards thinking copying stock photos is plagiarism. What do retards think stock photos exist for?
It’s sad if they’re always flaunting her artistic skills on TV, but these examples aren’t really that bad. Well…..except that they’re trying to make money off of her designs.
It just shows she’s not very imaginative. She at least has the skills to copy accurately, and the things she added to that pirate ship are consistent to the style and (kinda) make it her own.
Full disclosure: I’m not a huge AKB fan, but of the members that I recognize, Takamina is one of my faves.
If we take it all seriously, most likely every artwork since 2000 (boom of the internet) is most likely plagiarism, I mean, there is stock images of pretty much everything by now, even if someone does draw something and posts it as their own, there is probably someone who already posted that and submitted it as stock image or something.
For all we know, anyone can claim ownership to anything as long as they can prove they made the image first and uploaded it to the internet as stock image.
Also stock images are being sold and bought with intention of being used and edited to fit the users will, if someone uses an image and edits it and makes a completely new image of it, how can you actually say it’s plagiarism by then. I’ve seen logos and stuff being used off images I made myself, if it’s in the internet, it’s no longer yours, hence I stopped uploading my works to the net.
Get used to this kind of s♥♥t people and get over it. this is the INTERNET. World wide resource.
And i’m not even a fan of AKB in the first place lol.
>>“I didn’t think she’d survive the arrest of her mother, but this time it is hard to see her continuing.”
>>“Aren’t they ashamed to be trotting out a sex criminal’s daughter on TV still?”
I think we’d all like to know more about this story..
Reference Material. Jesus, when will non artists understand the difference between blatant tracing and using reference material.
This is clearly not tracing.
The frog is a 1:1 copy….. at least THAT is tracing.
Agreed. We did this alot in art when I went to college and, yeah, there were gonna be similar things that I guess people could call plagiarism. The boat and elephant, perhaps, but the tent was purely a reference and was re-styled and done completely. The only thing she really took from that was the circle with stars and the red and white colouring. If that’s stealing then anything is.