If you’ve been on the Internet at all over the last, say, year, you may remember seeing pictures of a giant inflatable duck, bobbing in the ocean in various ports around the world. The whimsical piece is the work of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, who intended it as an environmental statement about the earth’s waters (sort of a “Planet Bathtub” kind of thing). However, one thing Hofman feels we do not share is the right to giant floating ducks! Now Hofman doesn’t build his ducks, he just sends drawings of the duck to whoever wants to build one themselves, so when the Tall Ships festival in Los Angeles ordered his “plans” last year (plans they maintain were just untechnical sketches), they probably assumed they could reuse it in the Philadelphia Tall Ships festival the following year.

Not so, says Hofman, who fumed:

“I was shocked. They don’t have permission to show my duck again. And they are charging money for tickets. I want this rubber duck for the whole world to see. It is sad. They make it into this joke, but the rubber duck is not a joke. It is serious artwork which connects all people in the world.”

On top of all of that—they’re not even using the same duck, but have constructed a second in Philadelphia. This only made Hofman angrier (“It’s the exact same duck! I am furious.”), but to be fair, some of his anger appears to be related to a late payment from the Los Angeles Tall Ships festival.

It’s all a bit absurd to me, probably because I just don’t think “big duck” is so conceptually unique as to merit such a sense of artistic ownership, even by the strictest definitions of intellectual property. And really, if anyone is being ripped off here, isn’t it the original rubber duckie toy innovator, Peter Ganine, who patented his “upcapsizeable duck” in 1949?!? (Yeah, that’s right. I looked up the history of rubber duckies.)

Regardless, I invite you to gaze upon the original and the impostor, side by side. Place your bets!
 

 
So which mock duck is the real deal? If you guessed the left duck, congratulations; you are an aesthete with a trained eye and refined tastes. However, if you guessed the right duck, you’re a vulgar philistine and a rube, doomed to be fooled by charlatans, art forgers and snake oil salesmen all your life!

This duck controversy is getting press just after artist Richard Prince made tens of thousands of dollars a pop selling prints of other peoples’ Instagram shots—since they were altered just slightly, the work is considered “transformative,” and therefor legal (if not terribly ethical or artistically creative). So if you have an Instagram account and you think your work can be monetized, watermark that shit!

But if you make giant ducks… maybe lighten the hell up?
 

 
Via Philly Mag