DJ Shadow Variations
Deke McClelland wrote in email:
Have you ever heard of this guy before? One of the better ambient trip-hop guys out there. Anyway, I was amblin' along when I noticed something familiar on one of his album covers.Go to www.amazon.com/music, search for "DJ Shadow," and take a close look at the two versions of the album art for The Private Press (#3 & #8 the day I looked). If you haven't seen these before, I won't spoil the surprise -- but two variations on a theme + the record's name can't be an accident.
Just so happens to be an excellent album, too (if you're into this kind of thing).
If you're an O'Reilly fan, you can jump to the punch line by just looking at this cover.
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Comments: 10
his 1996 debut release, Endtroducing, is still some of his best.
cute. please do not sue him.
please do not sue him.
Suing's out of the question, as the engraving of that marmoset (or whatever it is) is most probably in the public domain.
I have a repoduction of it in this book, which was first published almost twenty years ago. And, as the title suggests, the original engraving is probably over a century old. So unless the family of Master Engraver Jebediah Q. Cornpepper* wants to throw down, then it's a moot point.
*I just made that shit up.
PS: Endtroducing=one of the top ten records of the 90s, fuh rizzul.
The engraving is, as Ben says, in the public domain; it's from the huge and ancient Dover Pictorial Archive, as are many of the animals featured on O'Reilly covers.
Why on earth would we want to sue anyone? If, as Deke suggested, this is some kind of a nod to O'Reilly, we'd be honored by the tip of the hat. But even if we were concerned about our trademarked animal design, this wouldn't be an infringement. What we trademarked was the use of the animals in conjunction with specific programs, and for technical books on those programs. The use of animals on our covers is what is referred to as "trade dress," and is protected by the law of unfair competition (i.e. people can't pretend to be us by using confusingly similar imagery on similar products for a similar audience.) This use obviously wouldn't fall into that category.
(FWIW, as far as I know, O'Reilly has never filed a lawsuit against anyone, or even threatened one, in our 25 years of history.) As Ben and Yoz point out, many (though not all) of the O'Reilly animals are from 19th century natural history books, of which we have a very large collection. Originally, we got them from the Dover collections, but they had limits on how many you could use for commercial purposes, so we went out and got our own original sources. (Plus we commissioned artists to make some new ones in the same style.)
It's sad how much misinformation has been spread about trademarks, whether through ignorance or malice.
I noticed that the chicken was the same that I had on the XML book :) But I hadn't see that the special edition had an o'reilly animal on it too.
(please excuse my poor english I am French)
Have a look at DJ Shadow's flat out touring schedule this year, if your town is listed i highly recommend it
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