I was just browsing around ANN and I found this article about Takehiko Inoue plagiarising from photos of NBA players for his manga, Slam Dunk. I suppose he just used the photos as a reference to draw the characters. You could say basketball players will look like basketball players, but some of the examples are pretty convincing. You can read the translated article here.
Of course, the question is not whether he used a reference or not. I think it would be impossible to draw people playing basketball without some kind of reference. I think the point is that he used copyrighted photos from the NBA to draw his manga, and it looks like he pretty much lifted scenes straight from the photos.
Personally, I think the story and dialogue would be more important than the scenes of people jumping around, and I don’t think it would be possible to plagiarise that from photos. Still, it’s an interesting look at where the line is drawn for considering work plagiarism. What’s next? Characters with purple hair being copyrighted?
3 replies on “Slam Dunk manga artist accused of plagiarism”
Of course it’s not plagiarism. How many reproduction of the “Mona Lisa” have you seen in different types of media? It just the action pose which are similar. The features. team names and copyrighted logos were not duplicated. This is just a bad example of poor journalism just to sell magazines.
HeHe just read this , its interesting, but its not an NBA pic u showed. Its an NCAA pic, Michigan VS Duke. They are university players. Dont know how much difference it makes……….
You’re all pretty stupid. This is technically plagurisim, through and through. You might believe it minor but plagurism is plagurism and people have been sued for far less cases.