Ask HN: Finding the Australian Aboriginal flag in all artworks
It was created in 1971 by an artist named Harold Thomas and went onto to become culturally accepted as the flag of the Aboriginal people. And then as above, went onto being proclaimed a national flag by the government.
Unfortunately, since then, Harold Thomas has licensed the flag to various private agencies. One of the licenses was exclusive to a clothing label, which now means that no other Aboriginal business can print clothes with the flag on it without paying royalties. (Sitting around 20%) A lot of Aboriginals feel dismay at the current situation of the licensing.
I am rather free market orientated and do respect the artists desires.
But, the situation is rather unique, I can't seem to find any other examples in the world of a nations/cultures flag being owned by an individual.
The creator has no intention to relinquish the copyright, so movements have already sprung up.
A good timeline of events can be found here -> https://clothingthegap.com.au/pages/aboriginal-flag-timeline
The page above found an artwork released 4 years prior that contains the visual elements of the flag -> https://i.imgur.com/rKbS2m4.jpg
The flag artist studied European art just before he created the aboriginal flag so he may have already copied it himself.
For a bit of fun and to build a case, I thought it would be a cool experiment to try find the Aboriginal flag in as many pre-existing artworks as possible.
I am looking for API's and libs that would help me achieve this as I think it is a fun problem.
Regardless, I've used HN for over a decade and have no doubt some of the smartest people on the planet live here.
So if you find this tale intriguing and perhaps unjust, any advice on how to tackle this problem from a public policy perspective would also be great.
The company he gave the exclusive rights to was co-founded by his friend. Who got fined 2.4 million dollars the year prior for selling "authentic" Aboriginal art that was actually made in Indonesia.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/11/compa...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-travel-briefcase-amer...
The RCMP uniform trademark was licensed to Walt Disney in order to protect it for 5 years while the RCMP learned how to do it on their own: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mountie-no-longer-disney-s-1....
Canada has specific laws and protocols on the use of its symbols, which include the flag. It doesn't cover aboriginal or provincial flags, but has some interesting clauses of how and where they can be used: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/commerci...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_W%C3%BCrttemberg
Wouldn't this be the exact thing that the copyright holder would want too, only not "for fun" but for litigation?
I'd be interested if it ever existed before the original artist made it but have my sincere doubts is even a remote possibility, historians seem to be of the opinion he just made it up in the 70's and it stuck.
Flags have never held meaning to real indigenous culture.
Depending on jurisdiction and when copyright was claimed (laws change) that is not necessarily true. In USA use to be first to file was awarded the copyright. Also in USA, for instance, copyright is granted for collections, organizations, arrangements or compositions of pre-existing things. Such a photographer can claim copyright on photo of a bridge. Or editor for a collection of public domain poems.
The actual law for the US (17 USC §201 (a)):
> Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work. The authors of a joint work are coowners of copyright in the work.
You cannot own copyright on a work that you have not authored, unless it has been (lawfully) transferred to you.
Incidentally, this is basically the core of the "Happy Birthday" copyright dispute: it was never established that the Hill sisters authored the lyrics, so they never had a copyright interest in it.
AIUI, USA didn't adopt copyright as an unregistered right, ratifying the Berne Convention, until 1988, 100 years after most of the rest of the World.
I don't quite know how registration works (see copyright.gov) but it seems there might be a presumption of ownership that's established? They still have registration in USA and it affords greater rights (higher damages in cases of infringement I think). Notably, novelty is not an absolute requirement for copyright registration.
The requirement that the author must hold copyright seems to be implicit in earlier versions of copyright law all the way back to the 1790 Copyright Act; I don't see any provision that would let one copyright a work one was not the author of.
Registration creates prima facie evidence that the registrant is the legitimate owner of the copyright. Anyone who disputes the claim in the face of a registered copyright has the burden of proof to demonstrate that the registration was erroneous.
Yes, but you're not copyrighting those pre-existing things in that case, you're copyrighting the collection, organization etc. And if somebody else had done those before, you'll again have a hard time copyrighting it (given that you've copied it).
> Such a photographer can claim copyright on photo of a bridge.
But not of the bridge, which is the pre-existing thing. His photo didn't exist before.
Though photos are, in my opinion (and I'm not a lawyer), one of the really interesting things that I believe make a lot of the issues of our current system of copyright very visible: 100 photographers can stand in the same spot, aim their identical cameras at the same point and make virtually identical photos, and can all, individually, claim copyright on their photo that, if you printed them out and mixed them, they couldn't pick from a line-up.
I know the Australian Broadcasting Company has a lot of their archival video under Creative Commons, so that might be a good bet. If anyone has a better idea, please let us all know :)
https://www.abc.net.au/archives/openarchives.htm
If I draw one on a piece of paper and hang it from my balcony, where do I stand under this licensing?
And if I sell that on Etsy, or maybe a landscape that has an element in the background where this flag can be seen?
(I am an Australian, but not indigenous)
IANAL, but I believe you're 23 years too late
Trademark is probably the issue that's most pertinent. Even if the flag weren't a work owned by Thomas, for copyright purposes, then it seems it's their trademark (registered or established by use).
IANAL
There’s no question he designed it (although that artwork that contains a very similar design is very interesting). But the Government should have probably compulsorarily acquired it by now if he isn’t willing to give it up... I guess they’re waiting for him to die so it won’t be as easy for them to be dragged to the high court over the “on just terms” clause in the Constitution.
My reasoning is that they're a lot more likely to have another "The Castle" episode (great movie, by the way) while he's alive rather than when the copyright is assigned or inherited to somebody else after his death.
I don't see any mentions of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_51(xxxi)_of_the_Consti...
Except maybe the US flag in the US (given the particular US prohibition on copyright of federal government works), I don't see why not; and, actually, if the US were to adopt a private design as the official national flag rather than commission it, I'm not sure it would be a problem even in the US, since other private works adopted as national standards but not created by government in the US remain protected by copyright.
There are certainly ways a private copyright on a national flag is inconvenient, but inconvenient and impossible aren't the same thing.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_flags
"I, PHILIP MICHAEL JEFFERY, Governor‑General of the Commonwealth of Australia, acting with the advice of the Federal Executive Council and noting the fact that the flag reproduced in Schedule 1 and described in Schedule 2 is recognised as the flag of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and a flag of significance to the Australian nation generally, appoint that flag, under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953, to be the flag of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and to be known as the Australian Aboriginal Flag with effect from 1 January 2008."
As far as searching for prior art, I would probably look at using a large data-set like the [1] 2.8 million art images released by the Smithsonian. So you can process it all locally rather than uses a SAAS api.
Then use something like tensorflow to do the image recognition. Here's a [2] fun tutorial.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/smith...
[2] https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/tensorflow-f...
And yes it is a rather peculiar situation, I'm still trying to figure out if any other flag on the planet is copy righted by an invididual.
He has every dam right to do as he wishes with his own creation.
He has always had copyright and everyone knows this. It's his creation, it came from him, it's used today exactly as he created, nothing derivative.
If you don't want to respect this you can also shove your GPL or shove your copyright over books. You show respect what people create or you don't.
To the question, to attack him I'd start searching here - https://trove.nla.gov.au/ See if you can find early articles saying how he did it, he might say he copied in part something or you might be able to twist what he says against him. Track possible artists or styles over picture search.
But they didn't, so the government can get stuffed.
I love the way you want the government to steal from an indigenous man here. Haven't they stolen enough yet?
Harold Thomas owns it. It's been recognised he owns it. He can do as he wishes with it.
If a bunch of people want to continue following something that's owned by someone else they can, but they follow the creators rules.
Lets just steal Linux off Linus and co because we feel like it shall we. Remove his stupid GPL v2 because we want to.
I want the guy to profit as much as possible, but the flag is pretty much world renowned for Australian Aboriginals at this point.
Having one individual choose how it is used on their own personal whims is a bit much.
By the way, it reminds me of the flag of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (a party from my home state in India), which coincidentally also uses a Sun amongst their symbols. I wonder if they've got a version with the Sun on their flag.
If I were an organization with clout in the field I would propose an alternative flag, but I imagine people are attached to this one. Well, good luck!
There's probably a good name on one of the SIFT papers if you're also looking for some algorithms
Good luck with this, I think its a good cause. It finally got me to register on HN so I could up-vote it :)
It also ignores the fact that the one who asked the question was hoping for the same thing as SubiculumCode.
Editing bypasses the text length restriction.