Here’s a heartwarming little story for y’all. Seems there’s this fellow, name of Todd “Goliath” Goldman, who purports to be an artist. He’s got a gallery show going on in LA right now. Here’s one of the more famous painting being displayed at the show.
Problem is, it’s famous at the moment because it was originally drawn six years ago. By someone else. The image was stolen directly from a webcartoonist named Dave Kelly. And by stolen directly, I mean that the dumb cocksucker straight up traced that motherfucker. That’s really extraordinarily shameless. Apparently, this isn’t the first time Goldman has come under fire for plagiarism. He’s previously been accused of stealing the design and concept for his character Eve L. from another webcartoonist, Roman Dirge, inventor of Lenore, the cutest little dead girl. And others have noted similarities between his Goodbye Kitty and Neko, an animated character from an open source computer app dating back to the late '80s. Goldman has built a career out of selling these characters on t-shirts and as original works of art, with his name attached. The dick.
In the area of things Goldman is known for that he actually invented himself (so far as anyone knows), his most high-profile success has been a line of t-shirts with cutesy, quasi-feminist slogans like, “Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them.” Hence the title of this thread, which in the spirit of Todd Goldman, I shamelessly stole from this site.
I first heard this story courtesy of Randy Milholland, creator of the indescribably awesome webcomic, Something Positive. Since Goldman appears to have a special fondness for stealing from webcomics, the webcomic community has taken special glee is spreading this information far and wide, even working it directly into a few strips.Dave Kelly’s website, naturally enough, has the best source of links to other comics and message boards where folks with an interest in either webcomics or basic integrity have been tearing into Goldman like a pack of piranhas skeletonizing a cow. And by God, I can’t think of a more deserved fate for this prick. Except maybe being literally skeletonized, instead of merely figuratively.
Unbelievable. No moral compass and dumb as charcoal to boot. I hope he gets his ass sued and I’m asked to sit on the jury. Uh, wait, to make sure I’m not excused from the pool let me just say: “Well, the drawings aren’t identical. And the changes are an artistic commentary on the originals. I’d have to see what the artist has to say for himself before I’d be able to form a fair opinion.”
Geez. What a creep. I am horrified that he was able to get away with this for as long as he did. Please tell me that someone has alerted the gallery and had them pull the plug on the “show”. I haven’t had a chance to read all the posts about this on the other sites yet, but I definitely hope the Something Awful folks make an example out of this uncreative twerp.
Here’s a good summary of all the suspicious examples in Goldman’s work.
I was in Vegas last month and was in a gallery that saw this stuff for sale. Pretty amazing what some of it ran for–have to wonder how the gallery owners (presumably one or more chains) are feeling about this now.
Stupid? How about stealing an essay from that obscure publication, the Wall Street Journal? That’s what a producer for CBS News did for an essay on libraries for Katie Couric - now that producer is unemployed.
What? You’re comparing an artist tracing over another drawing for financial gain with an intelligence agency including what academics thought on a subject (which has nothing to do with this OP by the way)?! Don’t you know anything about intelligen—
Um, the point was that the British intelligence agents who prepared the report didn’t just “include what academics thought on a subject”. They flat-out copied material from academic papers without crediting their sources.
Surely even you can understand that this is problematic not just in terms of abstract ideals about intellectual property but in practical terms of the reliability of intelligence. Readers of intelligence reports need to know as much as possible about the sources from which the report is drawn (except where revealing sources would compromise security requirements) so they can estimate how trustworthy the report is.
If intelligence agencies are cobbling reports together with plagiarized material from openly available published research, some of it out of date, then they’re giving a false impression to their readers about the truthfulness and reliability of their information. Considering the magnitude of the decisions that are based on the information in intelligence reports, this is not a good thing.
