Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

theoutline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 122 posts

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#61

Post by ygra »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #40
ygra wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't copyright non-transferrable? You'd get certain usage rights, but copyright will always remain with the original artist.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Obviously, the historical facts are that copyright was transferable at the time. It's certainly transferable right now. Why is your sentence set in the past tense, and what are you thinking of?

Non-native speaker; tense used reflects how such questions are stated in my native tongue; didn't have any semantics to it.

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#62

Post by samastur »

laumars wrote: post #48
legitster wrote: post #16

I couldn't imagine getting so caught up in one piece of work. I'd like to imagine I would have just immediately turned around and told everyone I was the guy who made the cover for Aqualung and focus my energy on the next project. Also, it's very presumptive to assume I deserve a cut of your project just because it is successful. Not only do I claim my artwork had something to do with it (I doubt many people cared mu…

Others have already echoed my thoughts on copyright, so I won't repeat that, but I do want to raise one other point you touched upon: > I doubt many people cared much about the album cover Back in the old days of 12 inch records, people did care about album covers. I mean yeah, the music obviously matters more but album artwork was actually pretty important as well. One of the things I feel we've lost with digital mu…

We did but at least I, personally, have never bought or not bought a record because of its cover.

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#63

Post by thaumasiotes »

samastur wrote: post #62
laumars wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have already echoed my thoughts on copyright, so I won't repeat that, but I do want to raise one other point you touched upon: > I doubt many people cared much about the album cover Back in the old days of 12 inch records, people did care about album covers. I mean yeah, the music obviously matters more but album artwork was actually pretty important as well. One of the things I feel we've lost with digital mu…

We did but at least I, personally, have never bought or not bought a record because of its cover.

https://books.google.com/books?id=o0sti65JskUC&pg=PA64&lpg=P...

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#64

Post by laumars »

samastur wrote: post #62
laumars wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have already echoed my thoughts on copyright, so I won't repeat that, but I do want to raise one other point you touched upon: > I doubt many people cared much about the album cover Back in the old days of 12 inch records, people did care about album covers. I mean yeah, the music obviously matters more but album artwork was actually pretty important as well. One of the things I feel we've lost with digital mu…

We did but at least I, personally, have never bought or not bought a record because of its cover.

Maybe not exclusively because of the cover but I'd be lying if I said it's never influenced me to buy a record I was otherwise undecided about.

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#65

Post by crystaln »

soperj wrote: post #24
crystaln wrote: post #13

The nature of employment is that we produce works for hire. I don't see any exploitation here. Do album cover artists ever get windfalls from successful? Unlikely I think, unless of course they were well known artists who insisted on royalties. The album would have been similarly successful with any cover or no cover.

Would they still be selling t-shirts and posters of any cover or no cover and pocketing that money?

Nobody can say for sure. However the music is why the album sold, and I think why people want to associate themselves by buying t-shirts and posters.

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#66

Post by [deleted] »

djsumdog wrote: post #25
legitster wrote: post #16

I couldn't imagine getting so caught up in one piece of work. I'd like to imagine I would have just immediately turned around and told everyone I was the guy who made the cover for Aqualung and focus my energy on the next project. Also, it's very presumptive to assume I deserve a cut of your project just because it is successful. Not only do I claim my artwork had something to do with it (I doubt many people cared mu…

If you sell a man or women a piece of artwork, yes they can put it up in their home and people can see it. If people take photos in front of it, well the photo is of the people and the art could be fair use context. If they take that piece of art and copy it and put it on a book cover .. now that's not right. I've never actually bought art at an art fair, but I was with a friend who bought a ballet drawing once. I do…

[deleted]

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#67

Post by crystaln »

shub wrote: post #34
crystaln wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And after that the copyright transfer was inserted into contracts.

Not necessarily. At least for writing gigs my wife has done, often they involve assigning all rights but not ownership to the client. This is spelled out in the contract, I imagine to avoid controversy over whether there was "work for hire" or not. On the other hand, every dev job I've taken has had me sign a thing saying that the work I do is work for hire and the employer owns the copyright. Seems fair, they're giv…

Would this artist have made any money if they had assigned all rights and not ownership to the client? No.

So what's the difference?

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#68

Post by [deleted] »

mrleinad wrote: post #20
legitster wrote: post #16

I couldn't imagine getting so caught up in one piece of work. I'd like to imagine I would have just immediately turned around and told everyone I was the guy who made the cover for Aqualung and focus my energy on the next project. Also, it's very presumptive to assume I deserve a cut of your project just because it is successful. Not only do I claim my artwork had something to do with it (I doubt many people cared mu…

That's the point: Artists at that time weren't protected enough to retain copyright over their work. They are now. It's not whether "you actually have money now", it's that "you're making money with something I created and I deserve a piece of that too"

[deleted]

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#69

Post by threatofrain »

colordrops wrote: post #52
wpietri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy thing to say. But imagine Zuckerberg had hired you to code the first version of his site, paid you a few thousand bucks, and then he went on to be one of the richest men in America? We here in SV have evolved a culture and a set of business practices that do a much better job of compensating us fairly. We make good cash money, and we tend to get a share of the success when things get big. It's not like we as ind…

Besides the obvious argument that there is no obligation to compensate beyond what the contract specifies, it's a bit presumptuous to take credit for the success of others because of a painting or some website coding. Jethro Tull's success was due to their music, and not the album cover. Facebook's success was due to Zuckerberg's savvy and not the amazing nature of the code.

Even if the artist wasn't presumptuous, what does it matter?

Re: My Dad Painted Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’ Cover and It’s Haunted Him

#70

Post by Dylan16807 »

simonh wrote: post #56
Dylan16807 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certain revenue expectations in mind for any project. Any time something is wildly successful beyond that, I think everyone that made it deserves to split at least a few percent of the income.

That’s not a sustainable way to run an industry though. Who decides what constitutes wildly successful? Who decides how many percent and who gets what share of it? Whoever went on and did the work to make the project so successful would have had other costs in doing so, they must have budgeted it out, they might even sell on the rights to the project at some point as happened in this case. Is it fair to then hit the…

> That’s not a sustainable way to run an industry though.

Sure it is. Just because nitpicking is possible doesn't make the basic idea impossible. For example, of course the new owners would know what they were buying.

> Who decides what constitutes wildly successful? Who decides how many percent

Just as an example, it could be "more than 4x the expected revenue cited when doing the original negotiations", and 5%. (Or if "wildly successful" is too likely to get cheated, make it unconditional.)

> and who gets what share of it?

Plenty of ways to do it, just pick one.

Post reply on HN