One Mo' Time

Have we beaten this to death? I mean the Copycat and the Original Cat, which I've already referred to twice before, here and here. But Randy Kennedy's item, "Photographer Wins Suit Against Designer," in the Arts Briefly column of The New York Times, revived the issue for me -- particularly his description of the plagiarism involved.

A French judge ruled that John Galliano's fashion ads "too closely mimicked a technique" created by William Klein. (An example of Klein's technique, right.) In other words, the plagiarism did not involve an exact image but rather the imitation of a style -- or as the Associated Press put it, "[the judge] said the ads clearly violated intellectual property laws because Galliano never asked Klein's permission to use the style, which the New York-born photographer developed more than a decade ago."

The parallels to the case of a Vik Muniz fashion spread in The New York Times Style Magazine, which imitated the technique and the imagery of the artist Norman O. Mustill, are so close that it's bizarre. Here's some of the evidence one more time, as quoted from the original Muniz-Mustill item of March 13, 2006: