Did Olympus Steal Idea for Viral Ad About EP-1 Camera? (UPDATED)

Several PDN readers and at least one gadget blog have noticed striking similarities between a new viral ad on YouTube from Olympus and a stop-motion film by a Japanese artist who goes by the handle Dokugyunyu. The Olympus ad, entitled The PEN Story, employs stop motion to show a series of photo prints of a young man growing up and eventually attending the 50th anniversary reunion of his grammar school. At the end of the ad, Olympus touts its recently released EP-1 PEN camera.

A clever commercial with some impressive stop motion effects but was the concept stolen from Dokugyunyu? That's the conclusion that Gizmodo jumped to in a story this morning entitled "Olympus Stop-Motion EP-1 Ad Concept is Clever (Also, Stolen)."

Dokugyunyu's video, entitled "Stop motion with wolf and pig" is far more whimsical surreal than the Olympus' ad but tells a very similar visual story. The film, which was posted on YouTube about three months before the Olympus commercial, includes almost the same opening sequence of a person opening an envelope on a desk with a series of pictures popping out to tell a story via a stop-motion effect.

Though the similarities in both videos are hard to ignore, whether this amounts to stolen intellectual property is questionable. Laws regarding Fair Use when it comes to video sharing sites such as YouTube are murky at best.

Olympus, however, does seem to acknowledge in a description of its ad that the concept for its commercial wasn't 100% original. At the end of the description, Olympus offers "Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us."

Yeah, that sounded a little weak to us too.

We reached out to Olympus and Dokugyunyu to get each others' side of the story but we're still waiting for answers. Dokugyunyu had not responded to a message we sent him via his YouTube account and a spokesperson at Olympus America said the ad was actually produced by Olympus Europe which had not yet returned comment on the controversy.

"We're still waiting to hear back," Olympus America spokesperson Michael Bourne told PDNPulse. "Otherwise, I have no information which is really frustrating since it seems people are jumping to their own conclusions about it."

UPDATE: As noted by Massimo Cristaldi in the comments below, since we posted our story, Olympus has added the following info to its video:

"Some of the comments we have read here suggest that we should mention the creator of 'A wolf loves pork,' Mr Takeuchi Taijin. While we were looking for a way to realise a story describing "a journey through time" based on printed images, we were inspired by Mr Taijin's brilliant work. For this reason we intentionally quoted his work in our little movie while showing full respect to his original idea. We didnt mention his name because we did not want to do so without his prior agreement.
However after considering some of the comments posted here we have decided to add credits to him and his work, which we obviously absolutely love"

In the mean time, check out both videos below and tell us what you think.

Comments

[Massimo Cristaldi]

If you go right now on youtube you can see that, 50 min ago, they've updated the description of the video:

"Some of the comments we have read here suggest that we should mention the creator of "A wolf loves pork", Mr Takeuchi Taijin.
While we were looking for a way to realise a story describing "a journey through time" based on printed images, we were inspired by Mr Taijin's brilliant work. For this reason we intentionally quoted his work in our little movie while showing full respect to his original idea. We didnt mention his name because we did not want to do so without his prior agreement.
However after considering some of the comments posted here we have decided to add credits to him and his work, which we obviously absolutely love. "

It looks like: steal the idea and hope nobody will find similarities.... And, if yes, say that you didn't want to mention the name of the author without his consent, while, probably without his own consent, you're already realized the commercial...

Massimo

[Rob Deaton Photography]

Hell yeah it's the same lol they should give him more than just acknoledgement :)

[pam]

Adds are funny eh? I didn't buy the Olympus Evolt because of it's online add which had a strange resemblance to that gay kid Matthew Sheppard that was killed and left on a fence to die in Wyoming. The docudrama about him was circulating at the time and that image was fresh in my mind.

I had the money and the camera fit my hand the best of any that I have held before or since but the add totally put me off and Olympus is still not on my buying radar.

[Jason Keeley]

I guess it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.