Yesterday somebody shot me an FM about whether or not they could post an MOC that looked similar to my recent-ish red and blue trucks. What was meant to be a short reply morphed into this, and I thought it might be appropriate to post this somewhere where I could express my views to everybody.
Personally, I love when someone posts something similar to my stuff or inspired by me, because it means that I have impressed them enough with my models to influence their own design. If someone is ignorant enough to believe that they have the sole right to a design, they are mistaken. If you built an exact copy of their model and never posted it, they can neither know or care about it. Therefore, why should they care if you do post it?
Something that a lot of people seem to get worked up about in this kind of thing seem mostly concerned not so much with the copying itself, but with a lack of credit. If you are directly inspired by something, or know that you directly copied someone's design, common sense says that you should credit the original author/designer/artist/whatever.
From what I understand, the only thing we have in common here is that we built 6-wide pickups. I was inspired by multitudes of builders, most notably mister zumbi, ricecracker, and proudlove, but I don't think that they would be bothered by the fact that they influenced my designs. We take, they take, they give, we give. It's a circle, and nobody can take credit something that belongs to everybody, which is the right to build and post models.
I apologize for my circular, longwinded rant, this is just something I feel strongly about and apparently needed to get it all out.
In short, please post it, it's a major ego boost for me, and I get to see an another awesome model.
-Torin
P.S. As I was typing this, I found another inspiration for the red truck, here:www.flickr.com/photos/brafalski/4813975065/
I didn't directly reference it, but there are definitely similarities in my mind."
Well said, mate!
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