Grrr!  It's a terrible thing.  I don't blame him if he's pissed that I used an example in the form of the phrase "Cindy Crawford" to characterize his argument, and he didn't actually use the phrase "Cindy Crawford" himself!  I hope when Glenn comes home, he rains his righteous wrath upon me. :)

Lighten up, please.  We're having a debate.

I guess I lose the argument, then.  Heh.  If those are the rules.   (I thought people who assigned arbitrary rules to things were idiots, BTW...)

Oh hell, no I don't.  Lightboxing photographs that you found in magazines and publishing it as 'your work' IS cheesy and unethical.  And anyone who says, "everybody does it" is simply saying, "I do it."

Okay, Dave....what topic shall you and I debate next? 

Consider it seconded Ethan...

Jason

I'm not an professional artist, so I don't have a dog in this hunt, but I think tracing a photograph (for a likeness of a famous person, for example) is not anywhere near the same as tracing another person's artwork. If you pull a Liefeld, and trace existing artwork, you're stealing another artist's design, anatomy, perspective, all of which was very time consuming and creative, for the originator, and passing it off as original work.

How is any of that analogous to tracing someone's likeness, or tracing a photo of a car, or a locomotive, or a horse, or any other person or thing that has been photographed? If I want to nail a likeness of Lincoln, why spend hours trying to nail it freehand, when a trace can do it better? Seriously, what is unethical about that?

Dave P., thanks...appreciate your support.

My point has been made and I'm not in the midst of any debates with Ethan or anyone else.  Everyone is free to do whatever they want to do.  And anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see that I never advocated the theft of intellectual property, photographic or otherwise, so there's nothing for me to defend.