Heavy Strain

A few months ago I got an e-mail from someone I did not know, and with whom (as far as I know) I have never corresponded. The message said: 

“The polaroid you found of ice in a strainer is used in the installation menu of the PS3 game Heavy Rain. 

They used the frame of the polaroid, tape and all.” 

I am not a gamer, and I have no easy access to a PS3 system, so I fanned out on the Interwebs to see what I could find, and a bit of search-engine jujitsu turned up proof of what the correspondent had said. Sony did, in fact, somehow wind up using an image which originated on this web site in the PlayStation3 game “Heavy Rain.” 

I’ll show both images side-by-side, but first here is the original image: 

Ice in a Strainer

That image has been sitting on this web site since 2005 — here it is at its original location. It is a scan of a Polaroid picture I found on Northern Boulevard in Queens. It is part of my Foundcrap series. Polaroids are always interesting but I liked this one because someone had taken the time to label the image with a description of its content. Otherwise I would have had a hard time guessing that this image showed ice cubes in a strainer. This image has been among the most frequently accessed items on this web site owing (I assume) to a general fascination with Polaroid pictures. 

Here, then, is a screengrab from the installation screens of Sony’s PS3 game “Heavy Rain”, borrowed from the Heavy Rain Collectors Edition page at autaku.com: 

Heavy Rain

The image on the right side of this screen is clearly based on the Polaroid image seen above. The middle portion (with the ice in the strainer) has been replaced and details of the image have been touched up, but the frame of the image and the pieces of tape are clearly identical to those seen in the Polaroid image found here. The details of the torn pieces of tape and the nuances of the spots of dirt and debris are too random to be accidental. Here are the two images next to each other: 

 

Another image also appears to be derived directly from the Polaroid image found at this web site, but appears to have been more liberally manipulated (this screen grab also borrowed from the Heavy Rain Collectors Edition page at autaku.com): 

(Thanks to Steven McKenzie for letting me use these screengrabs.)

I do not know which is more interesting: the fact that an image from this web site somehow landed inside a Sony video game, or that someone who played that video game saw the image and recognized it as having originated from this web site and took the time to send me an e-mail telling me about it. 

There are several other appearances of the Polaroid frames in this YouTube video, which captures the complete series of setup screens for the game. 

This eye-opening bit of apparent thievery reached me as I happened to be exiting a period of not trusting the Sony brand or the company. The rootkit debacle, exacerbated in my mind by Sony’s bafflingly arrogant public responses to it, seriously creeped me out; and their municipal vandalism-as-advertising project offended me. In response to these incidents I specifically chose not to buy Sony products for a while, though I abandoned my puny little protest soon enough. The thing is, Sony is a company of companies. The PS3 division has little interaction with, say, the DSLR folks (that is until the corporate bored rise up and demand synergies across unrelated business units, but that’s another story). To take out my annoyances on all of Sony would be like buying an air conditioner at Sears and blaming an employee of Sears’ Children’s Clothing department when the unit fails. 

I lack the energies or interest to figure out how this happened. Did Sony even scrape the image from this site? Or did someone else from another web site steal the image and use it on their web site, and did Sony scrape it from there? This is a found image but any grade schooler would assert that the “finder’s keepers” rule sufficiently determines that the image is mine.

I would be more offended if this was actually an image of my own creation. As a found object I think the spirit of things is not mightily upturned if someone else “found” it, though for a corporate bureaucracy-layered entity like Sony to go around scooping stuff up off of personal web sites is surprising. I used to work at a similarly multi-layered corporate monstrosity and when something like this happened (and it did) the incident was treated as nothing less than a Big Deal — which is not to say that lawyers were summoned or lawsuits filed but the threat was there and the matter was not taken lightly among the content companies where I worked.

I have been making web pages for a long time. That does not make me anything special but I think it gives me a perspective informed enough to say that people steal things. People steal things off the Internet. Sony steals things, off this web site and who knows from where else. It is simply a fact of life. Most times the theft is harmless, other times it is utterly baffling the things people think they can get away with. I remember a day I walked into a park and saw a piece of artwork which interested me. I approached the piece and discovered that virtually every element of the work, save for the material of which it was built, was lifted verbatim from one of my web sites. I found the artist and gently confronted him about it in an e-mail. His immediate response something like “If you don’t want people to take it then why do you put it out on the Internet?” — a response which made me think the guy was 14 years old. In fact he was an adjunct professor of art at a college, and he had been using carefully selected content from my sites to make works which earned him arts grants and gallery exhibitions. I showed the work in question to colleagues and friends (which include journalists and photo editors) and their reactions were consistent with mine, with a typical response being a jaw-dropping “Wow. Just … wow…” 

In another incident a friend mentioned the name of a band that she had just seen in concert. I had never heard of the band so I looked them up by utilizing one of those search engines that you can find if you have access to the World Wide Web. Have you ever tried one of those? They’re pretty cool. I typed in the name of this band into some search engine and quickly found the band’s web site. I was thunderstruck to find that an image of mine had been lifted directly from one of my web sites and placed front and center on their web site. There was practically nothing else there except for my image, uncredited, with even the exact same filename as it existed on my web site. How, I asked myself, could I have just happened to encounter this random band from the west coast that stole an image of mine, and how many other instances of this sort of thievery must there be out there? This was similar to the previous incident, in which I would never have known my material was being re-used had I not just happened to spot it on a random piece of art in a park. There have been other incidents, too many to recount, involving companies big and small, scraping content from these web sites like kids in a candy shop.

These incidents proved what I already knew, that this happens all the freakin’ time and all over the place, and there is little merit in foaming at the mouth over it unless the stolen goods contribute to the public image, livelihood, or reputation of an entity or individual. I think that was the case in both of the above instances, though I am not sure how to categorize Sony’s use of material which originated from this web site. I have never played “Heavy Rain” so I do not know if imagery of a Polaroid picture is significant to the experience of the game, or if Sony has some reason to believe that their use of the image is legitimate. Perhaps the manner in which they cut out the center portion of the image makes it legal. Whatever the case, as I said before, I think that Sony swiping content off of web sites is not as insteresting as the fact that an individual saw the image in “Heavy Rain” and recognized it from this web site and contacted me to let me know. That, I think, is actually kinda cool.