Do they at least donate some of the money to Banksy-promoted causes?
Just because Banksy breaks the law doesn't mean you can just lift his art and sell prints of it. Heck, in some places, his art has been legal, so the argument that he (and the respective property owners) have no copyrights is utter BS, and the disclaimer here on Woot nearly admits as much. Copyright, in the US, has provisions for anonymous authors and aliases, iCanvas is just choosing to ignore it.
Calling these "prints" and seeking to accurately reproduce the original art means that we can pretty much ignore any claims that iCanvas is clean because the original art was an open public display. You can take and sell pictures of public art displays, for example, so long as you are not trying to reproduce the original. A side note: Although there’s a disclaimer here on Woot that lets you know that Banksy and friends get no gain from sales and have no connection with these prints, the iCanvas website says nothing of the sort. On a plain reading of their Banksy page, which carefully avoids the word, “unauthorized,” an average reader would assume that these are prints by Banksy.
Banksy's art has different values, leaves different impressions, and holds different meanings when taken in situ. Therefore, such prints arguably devalue the original art and distort its messages. For example, the girl with the balloons, in real life, is on the Bank of London. Seeing that, rather than the print, conveys something bittersweet rather than just "Oh cool a girl with balloons. Balloons are awesome! I'm putting this over my Ikea futon bed!"
The originals of half of the other images are near or on key landmarks. Context, for Banksy, is almost as important as the art itself. That's why he's an anonymous graffiti artist: so he can put his art on specific, powerful canvases even when it's illegal to do so. The canvas matters. I wonder how many people have iCanvas prints hanging over their sofas and beds while having no clue that the original was, say, on a Palestinian wall.
If not a legal issue, then the selling of these prints is certainly is a moral one. I'm not saying that iCanvas needs to knock it off, because I'm sure my words would have no effect on them, but I'm arguing against Woot (and Amazon) associating with iCanvas and thus profiting off of the same problem. Woot, with the presences of a disclaimer that was missing from iCanvas, evidently had a similar concern but chose to sell the prints anyway.
You guys are better than that. You Woot guys have a higher standard than ordinary companies.
Woot buyers, likewise, are intelligent people. We're nerds, by and large--nerds who have expressed outraged when guys like Todd Goldman plagiarized art. The T-shirt community right here at Woot has had a few incidents of complete rage against T-shirt artists plagiarizing. And those were tracings, not the full-on, brazen selling of unauthorized prints with the artist's own name attached at the top. The message is nearly as bad as the act itself: "We know selling this is kinda wrong, but we're hoping you suckers won't notice or care."
This is not cool, Woot. This is the polar opposite of a Woot deal. It is a fooM.
