Origami Yourigami? Origami Lawsuit Targets Copycat Artist

June 26th, 2012. By AbiK

Been to Michael’s craft store lately? Origami is big. Forget paper airplanes—now kids come home from school with origami floral bouquets for mom and origami heteroptera (look it up). But for one artist—origami artist Robert Lang—origami isn’t some grab-some-copier-paper-and-get-folding thing; it’s serious art. And, he’s darn good at it. So good that folks know his work—and that can make any work that looks like his, even if it uses a different medium—look like copycat work. And that’s the crux of what’s becoming known as the origami lawsuit.

Origami artist Robert Lang has filed a lawsuit against abstract painter Sarah Morris alleging that she used his work—more specifically his crease patterns—in creating her own work. Without his permission.

For those you who are only novice origamists (is that even a word?), if that, a crease pattern is a computer-generated and quite complex pattern that an origami artist uses as a map of sorts to show where all the paper folds will need to go. Child’s play it is not.

According to a report at KPCC, Morris’ work veers more in the direction of graphic design, which is mathematical in nature; so Lang’s work, his crease patterns, caught her eye and intrigued her. And she “took a bunch of crease patterns, changed some lines, added colors to the shapes and turned them into very large paintings.”

Morris’ large paintings became a series that was shown entitled “Origami” in 2007. You can see some of that work at Live Auctioneers.

Needless to say, some of Lang’s admirers saw Morris’ work. And they felt a tinge of familiarity. And they let him know it.

You get where this is going: infringement lawsuit.

However, at the heart of this lawsuit will be the extent to which Morris’ work is considered transformative. As the report at KPCC notes, when it comes to art, an artist can use a copyrighted image if it satisfies the transformation ‘rule’—the work has to transform the copyrighted image into something new.

And “something new” is a bit of a vague notion—it’s fairly wide-open to interpretation. So we’ll see what happens.

Tags: Copyright Infringement, Copyright Law, Origami Lawsuit, Robert Lang, Sarah Morris

This was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2012 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Emerging Issues, Intellectual Property, lawsuits . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.