Leibniz and Newton (A Red Sox Story)
April 30, 2010Note: this is a stub I may or may not expand into a longer work published elsewhere on this site. The idea of stubs comes from Wikipedia, of course, and is something I plan on using here a lot more. The idea of this post owes much to Lawrence Weschler's Convergences.
My Image
In December of 2008, I had an idea for a shirt.
I Red Sox NY
I attempted to get the shirt printed by Spreadshirt, but was told I could not print it because I did not own the copyright to the Red Sox logo. This was true: I did not hold that copyright. I thought briefly about trying to sell the idea to the Red Sox, but never took action. I made an iron on of the shirt and posted the picture publicly to facebook.
About a week ago, W.A.G. (Wine Allergic Girlfriend for those who aren't following me here) sent me a link to this page:
I Red Sox NY #2
Did they steal my image?
"Ah," I thought, "they have taken my brilliant idea and done something with it." Less upset; I felt jealous. While I had come up with the idea, they had executed on it - this often feels like the common theme to my life: all ideas, no execution. And because mine had been a mashup in the first place, it felt fair that someone could take it and do something with it; and unfair for me to care.
Yet, the lack of attribution annoyed me. I had not issued any sort of Creative Commons license on the idea, but it seemed common internet/re-mix courtesy to point to where they got the idea. With this in mind, I wrote to the folks at I Red Sox NY who, I had learned by this point, have built an entire site and small business around the idea:
Hello crew at iredsoxny,
My name is Matthew and I created this image and t-shirt about a year and a half ago (check the date and the comments): http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1726111&l=2f172ce9d4&id=688670863
I tried to get the shirt printed, but was told by several sources that they wouldn't do it b/c I didn't hold the copyright to the redsox logo. A friend of mine sent me the link to your site. I was surprised to see that image and would like to discuss with you its origins and proper attribution.
Feeling nice and righteous, I received a reply relatively soon thereafter:
Matthew,
This image/idea is one that multiple people have created in the past, including during the 2004 series (http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/gallery/game7scenes?pg=6). I can assure you that we did not see your iteration of the concept, nor the version seen from the boston.com slideshow. It is simply an idea that multiple people have had and executed to varying degrees. We ran into the same screen-printing issues you did when we last tried to print the shirt in March 2008, and shelved it until this year.
We don't profess to "own" the image, nor can anyone as it uses the Red Sox logo. We just made the shirts made because we and our friends wanted them. If the Red Sox/MLB tell us to stop, we will, but we're just BRS fans living in NYC who want to piss off Yankees fans.
Hope that clears things up?
Go Sox, iredsoxny
The image they reference from 2004 is of a woman in the stands at Fenway wearing "my" shirt four years before I created it.
I Red Sox NY #3
Did I steal her image?
It's possible that I saw this image (or any of the others the iredsoxny folks claim are out there). I do not have a memory of seeing this image before; whereas I do have a memory of coming up with the image. It was a moment, coming up with the image, where my brain made a leap across a symbolic gap: the red sox image overlapping the similarly shaped heart in I Heart NY with the Boston-NY baseball rivalry providing the meaning and glue.
While it's possible that I saw the image before, it's also possible that this particular remix (Red Sox mashed up with I Heart NY) is a small instance of the Leibniz-Newton Calculus thing: the ecology was simply correct for these symbols to merge.
Coda
In a nice bit of continued convergence, here is the image as displayed when I visited Spreadshirt (as described above):
I Heart Shirts
Reader Comments (3)
I wonder to what extent *all* "I [icon] Something" shirts infringe on the trademarked original? Or is it just a case of fair use / parody? In any case, I suppose Spreadshirt has nothing to worry about since they used the wrong font in their example! >_<
Hey man, I know exactly how you feel. I have the same issue with having too many ideas, and little motivation to pursue them once the first hardship arises. But I think that in terms of this shirt.... I think some ideas are just so easily thought up, despite being fairly clever. I don't think I would have come up with the shirt, but had I been living in New York I probably would have. (I'm a redsox fan myself).
Just keep coming up with ideas, and pursuing them. Eventually you'll be lucky enough to come up with something that the masses of human beings in the world has not come up with in the past.
Well put Dee.