A couple weeks ago I posted that former president donald trump was teasing a "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT," which inexplicably turned out to be a set of NFT digital trading cards (!). Naturally the cards featured his favorite subject— him, natch— in various preposterous poses and outfits.
Against all logic and reason, all 45,000 of these "exclusive" cards sold out in just twenty four hours, netting him over $5 million bucks— confirming many pundits' suspicions that this was all part of some elaborate money laundering scam.
Jesus wept.
Ah, but it gets better!
In my original post I noted there was something off about the cards, as they all had a weird plastic sheen to them, as if they were generated by one of those AI programs that are all the rage right now. You know, the ones where you type in "trump as a superhero" and some algorithm spits out a reasonable facsimile of your request.
Turns out it's actually worse than that!
To absolutely no one's surprise, most of the "art" seen in trumps trading cards appears to have been stolen from copyrighted images.
For example, this ridiculous shot of trump as a cowboy appears to have been taken from a duster found on both Amazon and Walmart's websites. You can tell because the creases on the right arm and left body are identical. Someone just copied the jacket to their desktop, recolored it in Photoshop and crudely pasted trump's noggin on top of it.
Same goes for this absurd image of him as a hunter. The torso and lower legs (again with identical folds and creases) were nabbed from an online catalog.
And this astonishing image of him as an astronaut was lifted from NASA's website and altered a bit.
Then there's THIS incredibly amateurish shot of trump in a tuxedo, which was stolen from the Men's Warehouse site.
Paying for clipart and using it in a project is perfectly fine— that's what it's for. But swiping images from online stores, as was clearly done here is a different matter altogether. It's a clear copyright violation and an all around sleazy move by someone who should know better.
Jaysis. Has this two-bit conman EVER been involved in any venture that wasn't at least partially illegal or criminal?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.