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...
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...
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.
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 :)
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)
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...
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.
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!
Good luck with this, I think its a good cause. It finally got me to register on HN so I could up-vote it :)
