If I know where the idea came from, I’ll say. If I don’t, I won’t. I’m not going to do a lot (or actually ANY) research to try to determine provenance of a technique I might use. I will admit that I get irked when seeing demands for attribution, whether it’s deserved or not – and how would I know? Begging for credit just seems… petty.

Anything and everything can be inspiration.

I fiddled for ages to try and get the staircase right, several ideas tried. In the end I came up with one I was happy with.

Scrolling through brickshelf later I found a very similar design. Actually it was virtually identical; mine didn’t have a handrail though. That was the only difference.

In this case a coincidence; and it happens. I don’t think it hurts though to just put a passing mention in a photograph if you have clearly been inspired by another’s technique. Assuming they were the first to do it of course; and there is the grey area.

I interpret ‘claiming’ as ‘accepting after offered’, and so I would suggest adding:

“and extremely careful in requesting it.”

I’ve seen many people demand, insist, request, beg, and plead credit for something they believe themselves responsible for creating. And sometimes they’re wrong about being the source. But almost always they look like tools. “Flattery is the greatest…” and all that.

I would be even more at awe of Kevoh right now if he confirmed the ongoing rumours that he accomplished those accomplishments with actual LEGO bricks.

*will reserve his credit for Kevohplc stocks*

I do this too y’all! I cured cancer and AIDs and invented cold fusion but I’m not going to share with anyone. You’ll just have to believe me. Radical!

If you assert that something gains value if people think you came up with it first, and thereby loses value if you credit the source of your inspiration (by making it clear that you did not think of it first), you are making an implicit assertion that said value depends not on whether or not you actually did invent the technique, but on whether or not your audience believes that you did. In other words, that the value depends not on the factual truth of the proposition, but on what others believe that truth to be.

It then follows that any value you “gain” from allowing others to believe you invented a technique–which you allow by making a conscious choice not to inform them of the source of your inspiration–is gained dishonestly through a lie of omission.

Hence my statement that any such value is “unearned”–and in my mind, worthless.

Now, I need to be clear that I do not think that this is how things work: I do not believe that a creation loses any “value”–in whatever way you wish to define that term–when you credit your sources.

If anything, it adds value to you personally, in the sense that it increases your reputation as an ethical builder; to your creation, in that it creates an association between your creation and your source’s creation that raises the visibility and expands the audience of both; and to the community, in that adds positive reinforcement to the cycle of innovation to which Tim was referring.

It is in every conceivable respect the opposite of a zero-sum, I-gain-you-lose relationship.

I think my main difference is that I unearend value the same as you do, or something like that. Clearly I don’t really have a very good undestanding of economics.

I think your last paragraph is a really good point though, that we shouldn’t see crediting as giving something up as it will dissuade people from doing such–makes good sense on my end.

I’ve been sharing pictures of MOCs on-line since early 2005, am a fairly prolific builder and am probably reasonably well-known (at least to followers of this blog). In all that time I recall only a few instances where people claimed (wrongly) that I’d copied somebody else’s ideas without attributing them to the right person. Other people claiming ideas as their own that I know they very likely copied from something I did happened a few more times and did piss me off, but it is still outweighed by the many times that people actually do give credit.

You’re likely to run into jerks wherever you go on the internet, but the majority of on-line LEGO builders aren’t out to give anybody else a hard time.

It was just one little fig, no big deal at all really. Anyway, I bring this up because the thing is, I thought it was a little strange that he didn’t mention me, but most off all I was just disappointed that he didn’t do more to make it his own.

Copying someone elses stuff is a little lazy, doing so without giving them credit is a little disrespectful. But it’s also antithetical to the whole poit of a creative medium like LEGO.

I would also disagree with the statement that giving “credit” does not cost the person giving the credit anything, but I would say it does, as it really does subtract “worth” from your build.

I categorically disagree with this. And in fairness, perhaps that’s inevitable, because we’re dealing with a term that is both subjective and unmeasurable in this context: “worth”. I would say first to define your terms.

What is “worth” here? What are we trying to measure? Currency of any kind has an empirically measurable value. And even in the commonly-accepted metaphorical uses–for instance, the concept of “political capital”–there is still a somewhat measurable value exposed by the term, such as the degree of influence one has.

I am going to assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that “worth” is used here to mean “popularity”. I am doing this because a common frame of reference is needed for discussion, and because “popularity” on Flickr is something that can be measured in a very abstract sense in terms of page views and favorites. There are of course many other angles to popularity and worth of a MOC, but we can’t measure those.

That being said, it sounds as if you are defining the “worth” of a build as a function of how many completely original techniques it uses. I think it is unquestionable that coming up with an original, well-used technique adds value to that build–assuming you are defining “value” in terms of popularity. A build that introduces a new technique gets more views and favorites, if only for reference to the technique.

But just because introducing a new technique makes something more popular does not mean that crediting the inspiration for it makes it less popular. This is not a competition, and neither popularity nor artistic value are zero-sum. Most people do not think of something as a new technique because you did or did not credit your inspiration, they think of something as a new technique because they haven’t seen it before. Whether or not they’ve seen it before has nothing whatsoever to do with what credit you do or don’t give in the description–in other words, it depends not on anything you do or don’t do, but on the memories and experiences of the viewers.

They are going to arrive at your image whether you credited your source or not. You get a page view regardless, and if they like your image they will add it as a favorite. The point where the giving of credit affects anything is after they have already visited your page.

What have you lost?

In my view, the only way in which giving credit for the source of your inspirations subtracts anything from the person giving credit is if you believe the value of your build is dependent on others believing that you came up with the techniques in it first. And if you did, then you deserve the added “value” that comes with recognition for your accomplishments, to the extent that means anything to you.

But if you didn’t come up with the technique in the first place, then you don’t deserve that added “value” anyway. The only thing you are “losing” by crediting the source of your inspiration is unearned value that would be added by allowing others to think that you came up with it first. To the extent that you believe you are gaining any value at all by allowing people to think this, it is a lie of omission.

All of this wanking, of course, requires that you believe that you are actually giving up anything at all by crediting your source. I do not, and I think it is a very dangerous mentality to cultivate if you do want to encourage people to credit. Like many others here, I think that trying to keep track of who first came up with every single technique in use today is a fool’s errand that occupies time better spent actually building. But I think you should credit a particularly unique or useful technique if you remember where you got it from and it figures significantly in your build–it really does cost you nothing except the time spent typing the words.

As my nickname here indicates, I’m a physicist, and as such I publish papers in scientific journals. I’m not expected to attribute every single technique or every single bit of mathematics I use to the people who first invented them, because quite a lot of them are well-established or commonplace (and attributing them to a particular person would sometimes require archaeology). I am, however, expected to refer to journal papers and books that specifically influenced what it is that I do. (In case of doing research that probably does mean keeping notes or a database).

I don’t know where the idea to use icecreams as smoke came from either. There’s no conceivable way you could find out who used it first and as long as you don’t start claiming that it was you when it actually wasn’t, nobody has any reason to complain. If somebody does claim it as their own in a comment, my suggestion would be to reply to them that you’ve seen it somewhere else but don’t know who used it first. Case closed.

The issue is when a technique becomes more commonly used, making it a difficult to determine where the technique actually originated. The ice cream smoke is a perfect example. I’ve seen it used in multiple MOCs, but I have no idea who came up with it, and would have no idea how to cite the influence.

And to answer your question: if someone asked me where I got the idea for the wonderful technique, I would happily tell them I saw it in another MOC, mostly likely something featured on The Brothers Brick. I would never claim it as my own.

In most of the things I build, I’m not at all worried about whether or not somebody else may have done something similar before. Nobody expects everybody else to keep a library of techniques with names of particular builders associated with them so that they can add a lengthy bibliography to everything they build. That wouldn’t be reasonable and it would stifle creativity. However, if an idea I picked up elsewhere was crucial for my MOC or if some other builder helped me figure something out, then giving credit is the decent thing to do, irrespective of whether they were the first to come up with it. It really isn’t that difficult or all that much work.

If this concept were really as hard to grasp as some of the contributions to this discussion suggest, I’d seriously consider not showing pictures of the inner workings of my models. Why should I do favours to people if they’re not willing to do something in return? How much work is it to type: “HumVee based on MrYoder’s”, “Flanker model inspired by Mad Physicist” or “VW Beetle design copied from Mr. Zumbi”?

Not a hell of a lot.