What's yours is mine.

Idea ownership has always been an interesting subject for me. We're producing exponentially increasing numbers of creative ideas each year and there's bound to be redundancy. So what happens when someone comes up with the same idea as you and sells it first? Worse yet, what happens when your idea gets ripped off before it can be trademarked and you don't see a dime for all your hard work?

Fast Design wrote a story recently about a Brooklyn artist whose work was seemingly ripped off by UPS and Ogilvy for their outdoor campaign. It's pretty beautiful execution, if it wasn't actually taken from the artist, Ryan Johnson. 

The new ads by Ogilvy are on the left, put up in numerous places in Jakarta (interestingly enough, where the artist grew up). Johnson's original work is on the right.

But what confuses me is: if they did steal the visuals here, why not change them up enough where you could still get the idea accross of a moving person? Why keep the identical shape and size of each panel of color, the same staggering pattern, and similar construction? The creative team could have easily appropriated the idea of blurring a subject in their installation, without discrediting their own creativity.

Plenty of other objects can serve as pixels in this ad, illustrated similarly by Lego:

I'm simply surprised at this point by the fact that the ads are still standing. I think it's reasonable that Ogilvy wants to stand by its creative team by defending their abilities, but I think it's up to UPS to retain their own integrity and pull the ads.