Unless you’ve been living in a fallout shelter lo these many decades, you know the Cog commercial. A little metal gear taps a hubcap, the hubcap rolls into a tire, the tire bumps something else and something else and something else, and two minutes later, boom, there’s a car. No cuts. No trick photography. Just stuff, falling into other stuff, very politely, for two minutes, until it’s a Honda.
And, of course, Picasso. But isn't that exactly why we, for ourselves and those we counsel, advocate voracious reading, and film-watching, and art-show going — all in pursuit of a richly populated subconscious that spits out the creative goods when it needs to.
No surprise, sometimes it not only skates close to the wind, but cuts a little too close to original pattern. And I bet the lawyers, virtually without exception, will say you can play it any of the three ways you mention above, and, regardless, wind up well and truly screwed.
That said, Ernie, I do believe in spontaneous co-invention, and not just Edison and Tesla. Long ago, for my newly formed SF agency, we did an ad that featured the tragically receding hairlines of moi, my partner, and our board chairman with the line "avoid the coming recession." Week or so after it ran in Adweek, got a red hot flame in the mail (that was then) with a clip from something virtually exactly alike created by none other than Nancy Rice.
I apologized in a letter to the editor, but still felt badly.
I've been on both sides of the spontaneous co-invention argument and its legitimate. Probably explainable by quantum entanglement. But as George Harrison found out, its an argument that doesn't hold up in court. For what its worth, none of the three cases I've written about feel spontaneous to me. Wieden flat out stole Cog. Fairey tried to lie his way out of a situation and in the case of Harrison, too much time had passed between "He's So Fine" and "My Sweet Lord" for the spontaneous argument to be credible.
He "borrowed" heavily from Americana. To your point, though, he fessed up. In fact, he took it a step further and effectively said, "I love this so much I stole it."
And, of course, Picasso. But isn't that exactly why we, for ourselves and those we counsel, advocate voracious reading, and film-watching, and art-show going — all in pursuit of a richly populated subconscious that spits out the creative goods when it needs to.
No surprise, sometimes it not only skates close to the wind, but cuts a little too close to original pattern. And I bet the lawyers, virtually without exception, will say you can play it any of the three ways you mention above, and, regardless, wind up well and truly screwed.
That said, Ernie, I do believe in spontaneous co-invention, and not just Edison and Tesla. Long ago, for my newly formed SF agency, we did an ad that featured the tragically receding hairlines of moi, my partner, and our board chairman with the line "avoid the coming recession." Week or so after it ran in Adweek, got a red hot flame in the mail (that was then) with a clip from something virtually exactly alike created by none other than Nancy Rice.
I apologized in a letter to the editor, but still felt badly.
I've been on both sides of the spontaneous co-invention argument and its legitimate. Probably explainable by quantum entanglement. But as George Harrison found out, its an argument that doesn't hold up in court. For what its worth, none of the three cases I've written about feel spontaneous to me. Wieden flat out stole Cog. Fairey tried to lie his way out of a situation and in the case of Harrison, too much time had passed between "He's So Fine" and "My Sweet Lord" for the spontaneous argument to be credible.
"Love and Theft"-Definitely Dylan's best album of this century. Probably one of his best ever.
Did something get stolen?
He "borrowed" heavily from Americana. To your point, though, he fessed up. In fact, he took it a step further and effectively said, "I love this so much I stole it."