AKB48’s Minami Takahashi’s “Blatant Plagiarism” Exposed
- Categories: Japan, News
- Date: Jul 18, 2013 01:14 JST
- Tags: AKB48, Comparison, Copyright, Idol, Otaku, Plagiarism
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…”
| 
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We all knew there was no talent in AKB48 anyway.
AKB48 are on the way to their Nadir. It was good until it lasted.
No talent??? What would you call their sexy costumes then???
Good packaging. v(ʘωʘ)v
Girls just want to have fun, that is fun.
Amazon.
raw materials?
Ok ok you're right. I admit it, their costumes have talent.
“Plagiarism is the worst. What is she, Chinese?”
LOL
The Malaysian
who cares ...
In related news we match up the roundness of peoples iris's and find that they are all round.
You copied my iris?! Son of a bitch!
I see nothing wrong here.
I'm with you on this.
Well, she draws a frog/butterfly/frigate, and they accuse her, that the drawing looks like a FUCKIN frog/butterfly/frigate.
And how would you draw a frog/butterfly/beetle?
I'll allow the possibility she does have photographic memory and are just drawing those from memory.
I do however have a question why her name is in pencil but her drawings are in ink... as if they were printed on there. A special deal AKB made with the school to pass the idols so they could perform?
Don't they have anything better to do?
Take any picture, and there'll be a similar one on the internet.
Construct any sentence, Google it, and there'll be an identical one written by someone before.
Everything's been done before. There's nothing you can do except go kill yourself. But that's been done before too...
Or, you can flip the plagiarism nazis the finger and go on with your lives.
I wouldn't jump right to calling her a plagiarist, just a talentless hack with no sense of creativity or spirit of innovation.
Which one is worse? I don't know. You decide.
Maybe you could make this argument if her 'art' were not so obviously googled. You just sound like a feminazi defending anything a precious innocent woman does even though she is part of a group known for scandals, odd behavior and no talent.
the 02 26 anon didn't talk about women, huh? you're always bringing this subject and it's tiring
Sorry, but |2d| < |3d| will always be true, regardless of how many idiotic posts you make.
Taylor knows as much about women as a nun knows about sex.
(to 06:57 18/07/2013) And you're not even talking about Sigui from Queen's Blade ;)
i'm tired but not killed you know
my revolution is far from being yours
tiring? ok so don't read my comments?
They're supposed to be tiring, they're supposed to wear you down until you give up on 3d women and join the revolution.
They have talent. Swindling requires talent.
She picked up photos on google and they apparently were copyrighted.
The internet sucks balls now.
Which is irrelevant because copyright doesn't cover making your own original art based on theirs.
It's open to interpretation how much is based and how much is copied.
They would have bought the stock photos since theyd probably be a wopping $5 each. Then they could literally do whatever the fuck they want to them as they own the rights to use them as they please.
Sankakucomplex has stolen content from lots of japanese websites,not given credit and claimed it as its own "journalism". Those who live in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones.
This is possibly THE stupidest article I've yet read on this site, and that's saying something. First, plagiarism is a literary concept. You don't "plagiarize" art. Even applying the term by analogy to art, she did not straight up trace either the pirate ship nor the circus tent (the latter of which bares little resemblance to the supposed source anyway), but ~possibly~ used them as a reference for her own original designs. Yes, it's still original even if you have a reference, so long as you did not directly copy that reference. Not every (not any, except for "modern art" and good luck figuring out what they were trying to communicate) artist invents things wholesale, they have pictures, images, sources they work from.
wowreally? another topic about AKB? again? either this site is jealous of AKB or this site is all about AKB? a fan of a rival group perhaps? or just plain bitterness towards their popularity? because i thought sankaku is all about http://www.sankakucomplex.com/about/ and plus this site had stolen almost all of it's contents on Japanese site, so should we also call this site a Plagiarism?
OH NO! The bad drawing looks like the other bad drawing!?
Life over. She's gonna jump off a building now :o
AKBPirates48 - they'll be boarding your ship to do a hook-shaking event and load it with meaningless ballast... er... valuable disks.
Nice boat.
really? another topic about AKB?? is this site must really be jealous of AKB. a fan of a rival group perhaps? or just plain jealous of AKB's popularity?
I assume one of the peoples imaginary girlfriend liked akb and after she took out a restraining order they've been all QQ since.
really? another topic about AKB? again? either this site is jealous of AKB or this site is all about AKB? a fan of a rival group perhaps? or just plain bitterness towards their popularity? because i thought sankaku is all about http://www.sankakucomplex.com/about/ and plus this site had stolen almost all of it's contents on Japanese site, so should we also call this site a Plagiarism?
If u watch variety shows in Japan, u will notice tons of copyright music being played w/o credit to the owners. I've been so tempted to DVR it and send it in to the music labels. Japan seems to think that they can steal whatever they want
she has photograpic memory indeed
It's obviously not traced, they dont even match up, they might be the same size, but the grid method can do that. It's easy to fool people by taking two images and merge them together like in that vid. The images might be of the same types of things, and it's definite that they were copied, but the way art copyright works is if it wasnt traced, and if you take the original image and use it within another format then it is not in violation. In some instances you can even trace an image and it still not be in violation of copyright, say you traced a painting of a superheroe, then used that trace for a comic, slightly changing it, then there is no violation
People still think they can get away with plagiarism in this day and age?
Tell that to Rob Liefeld.
Reference Material. Jesus, when will non artists understand the difference between blatant tracing and using reference material.
This is clearly not 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.
The frog is a 1:1 copy..... at least THAT is tracing.
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.