Is Greg Paul serious about 100% originality?

Those of you who have been keeping track of Gregory S. Paul's complaints and sometimes frustrated rage on the Dinosaur Mailing List dml.cmnh.org/2011Mar/ may have noticed that he has made a big issue of people whose art happens to resemble his or even uses similar poses. His demand is basically:

1. Don't use any of my skeletal drawings for reference unless you pay me for the right.
2. Don't undercut me for paleoart jobs and contracts
3. Don't copy the "Greg Paul look" (whatever that is..... if you don't use soft oil pencil on coquille board, along with exactly identical skin textures and musculature, you can't possibly mimic the Greg Paul look).
4. Make your own original skeletals. Don't use my poses, make up your own, do all your own direct measurements, go the the museums and measure out every bone (yeah right, like they'd allow just anyone to do that!) and draw the whole thing from scratch.


The problem is, he's often violated this formula himself. If it's not good enough for Greg Paul, why is is good enough for everyone else?

He co-authored a paper which basically goes through the entire process he uses to produce his skeletals and life restorations of dinosaurs. And the ironic thing is, he's recently posted the thing to his website's CV as a FREE download, even though there's a TON OF DIRT in the thing that basically gives away just how "original" a lot of his illustrations really are. Here's the link: gspauldino.com/Guild.pdf Read this bad boy, my friend!

Ironically the paper's filename is "Guild".... it seems he's giving away all the secrets to his competitors despite wanting to form a guild to prevent undercutting. (Keep in mind that I too am in favor of a paleoart guild, though for totally different reasons since unlike Greg, I do not turn a crisis into an ego trip, alienate fellow artists while expecting them to form a guild for my sole economic benefit, or currently derive the majority of my income exclusively from paleo-art.)

In any case, as you read the paper at the link I posted above, make sure to focus VERY CLOSELY on the pen and ink drawings of the skeleton of T. rex by Irwin Christman (the main fossil artist of the American Museum back in the early 20th century). Christman's drawings of the articulated vertebrae look exactly like Paul's skeletal. Or rather, Paul's skeletal looks exactly like Christman's drawings. He makes no secret in this paper that he used SOMEBODY ELSE'S SKELETAL DRAWINGS as the basis for his own. He did not actually go to every museum for every specimen to measure everything by hand!

And logically, why should he, when there's a perfectly good scientific drawing or engraving of the bones that is near-photographic in its precision, available as a resource for scientists to use? Christman got paid for his work back when he did it. He wasn't trying to charge royalties on scientific information. Greg Paul benefited enormously from such diagrams, by not having to travel to museums in person and spend thousands on plane tickets, gas, hotels, etc (though sometimes he did actually fly to faraway museums, as with his work on Giraffatitan). But now he's claiming we shouldn't have the benefit of even using a similar pose to his in our skeletals, much less using them as a scientific reference for our own art, when he did the very same thing with Christman's stuff?

There's a thick line between indirect reference and outright plagiarism or copyright theft. There's very little outright stealing of Greg Paul's work in the paleo-art world. If the problem of Greg Paul ripoffs and "clones" was truly as big as he claims, we'd actually see a lot of popular illustrated dinosaur books that didn't SUCK beyond belief.  Indeed, what Paul did with Christman's work comes far closer to skeletal plagiarism than anything most of us have ever done. Except that it was not "illegal" for scientific purposes, to do scientific reconstructions for scientific books and papers, or technical presentations and lectures at trade conventions like SVP. It wasn't a for-profit endeavor with most of Greg's skeletals back then. But suddenly it is now? What are these bloody things? Scientific open-access diagrams or for-profit art? Maybe if Greg really wants to make some cash, and keep his credibility, he can run a site like Tracy Ford's, where you pay a fee to access skeletal restorations of specific dinosaurs and then you're free to reference them as long as you give him credit. Want another dinosaur? Pay another fee. Tracy seems to do pretty well with that system. And I've never heard him complain about Greg Paul "devaluing" his work due to all the years Greg hasn't been cracking down on visual referencing and "underground" sharing of his papers and skeletals.