Looking at an interesting picture this week. Managed to edit it to make it look much more exciting. Also, some information on copyright law.

Link to original image: https://openclipart.org/detail/1030/bag-of-money

I chose this image primarily since it resonated so well with my major, Finance. I thought the picture had a very simple but alluring style. I used the creative commons link searching “money” in the clipart section. The license is a Non-Commercial type able to be copied and used if it is not used in a commercial manner.

-using photo editing software, I spiced up this clip art of a man and his money to give it a story.

 

The program I used to edit the clip art was Gimp. The first thing I altered was the color. The original picture was lacking a focus, so I decided to color the bag of money to draw attention to it. I chose the color to recreate the color of a sack as closely as possible. The second alteration I made to the art was to add a second bag of money. Afterwards, I colored the bag as well to match the color of the larger bag. I did this by cropping the image of the bag and resizing it to look smaller than the other bag. Next, I added one red square on the man’s leg to insinuate the color of blood and that the man was injured. The final addition I made was to add a billfold of cash to the bag. With this addition, the money bag is allowed more color and shows the man is in crisis, dropping a large sum of his money while walking. I made all these changes in order to give the impression that the man had robbed a bank and had gotten injured on his escape. The bag left behind in the distance and money falling from the bag are meant to convey a sense of haste. With these elements together, I decided to create a humorous parody of the original work. I used the simple picture of a man holding a bag of money and used photo editing software to generate the idea that the man was a criminal in the process of robbing a bank.

The reason copyright rules exist in the US is listed in the very foundation of our nation, the US Constitution. Copyright law exists to promote the betterment of humankind and protect the people propagating that growth. The law however, provides certain exceptions and rules for people that are not the original creator use the creation of another. Some exceptions for this include education (where in face-to-face classrooms the rules are less strict than over the internet), music sampling, and parody. In the case of the Dumb Starbucks. A person was able to create an exact replica of Starbucks without being franchised. The only difference was the addition of the word “Dumb” in small text. The idea was to borrow from Starbucks brand name and leverage that to gain customers. Their defense was to use the fair use act and claim that the name was a parody of the brand Starbucks. If that was legal in a sense, then the additions I made to the clip art are in no way breaking copyright law. Since the copyright is filed under a Non-commercial type a secondary user is able to reproduce and change the image as long as the purpose of doing so is not commercial in nature.