Let's talk culture.
So when we talk about cultural context, we're talking about the society that characters, mediums, stories and elements live in and how culture affects both those things in question narritively speaking and how people based on those things affect that narrative. Say for example, the physiological reaction or "emotional affect" (not to be confused with emotional effect which details the emotional tone of a response) which could be summarised as the physical feeling you get when you deal with something is in this sense the result of some sort of stimulus -- like when you listen to a song you like and your anxiety is reduced because although you're in an unfamiliar environment you are pavlonian conditioned to find the song in question familiar - which overrules the feeling you have about where you are in space and time.
Anthropologist Edward T. Hall detailed in his 1976 book "Beyond culture" the meaning of 'high and low context culture' -- meaning that the choice in speaking styles of peoples will dictate whether a culture will cator to in-groups (people who are desirable to groups based on specific properties) based on similar experiences and expectations from inferrences are drawn... Or in higher-context culture, which relies on references to be the similar experience and word and word choice become far more important because less words are used to convey a complex idea through references -- basically the transmutation of living ideas or memes.
In this sense, an in-group can effectively communicate to members using less language whereas in a low-context culture, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word to change the tone of an entire unit of communication is much lower.
Well, we live in a world now where the transmission of ideas is infinite, memetics and ideas are cultural currency and we can design our own ingroups around whatever ideas and preferences we want meaning we have ultra-ultra high context culture which in something as simple as "more thrust more speed" convey a really complex idea about simplified attitudes about power and performance being linked to hamfistedness, silliness and the desire to have fun rather than just how thrust and speed as engineering principles correlate to one another.
Well, we now have reference stock culture with the internet, that we can use the context and expectations and known information about an existing thing to infer something about a subject without needing to reproduce it from scratch. This means really complex ideas can be communicated using cultural shorthand.
A good example of this musically would be plunderphonics - any music taken by taking any audio recordings and altering them to create a new composition, a term coined by John Osworld in 1985 in his essay plunderphonics or ; audio piracy as a compositional perogative. In the essay he explained that we would eventually be able to use the act of sampling to create whatever soundscape of context and meaning we wanted and be able to communicate many very very high complexity ideas using short-hands -- a growth of high context culture and a growth of culture as a whole using what were originally thought to be sound collages but now make up the majority of music.
With tools like photoshop entering the hands of the masses and the likes of youtube, this also became a big part of image culture as we experienced in the early 2000's with modern visual meme culture through imageboard culture (
which I was lucky enough to be a big part of -- staffing one of the mainstay sites of the movement and as such having to understand the associated copyright laws involved at a basic level)-- which allowed an idea to survive not just through circulation but re-use into new ideas giving the old idea new life whether this was additive to the idea of the original thing or subtractive, by using the source material to ascribe a quality to a new material all together -- a texture, or motif.
A good example of this in recent times is the movement of vaporwave which rather than choosing to hide reference materials and origins wraps and envelops itself in the origin as an affectionate and even loving nod to content origins to use the existing emotional attachment you have to those source materials as a short-hand to gain your emotional investment. This is then woven with many references not usually seen near eachother to create an entirely new context for the samples in question -- many becoming instruments or repurposed in entirely new ways.
This only really gets sticky when you move into the realm of monetization -- where you step up and start saying things like "well, doesn't the artist deserve to be credited and paid for their work?" -- Well, that isn't always obvious or even possible: with the mass redistribution of media online its very common to flat out not know where something came from or even to assume it was created originally for the community you're from and not recontexturalized at all (which is basically what happened here -- I thought it was a comission especially for our little website) so I was pretty shocked to find out it wasn't -- and even moreso to learn it was a painting, not a collage or digital synthesis using fractals or other tricks.
Now what really bakes my noodle (thanks Wachowski brothers) is what happens when you know you're not going to attempt to monetize something in any shape or form and people are still upset about contextualisation.
That really doesn't make sense to me.
I mean, if you want the grandaddy of recontexturalization for a website like this with strong Japanese motifs, just look at the language: Japanese until kana hit the scene in the 1700's basically recontexturalized "Simplified Chinese" Pinyin which you know as kanji -- and without it, Japan would have been basically illiterate with no formalized high context language system with very low compliance to common language infrastructure, axiomonomic exchange and memetic interchange, relying on explicit low basall example the same way the Chinese did until the 1900's.
Oh boy, wouldn't that be something?
Because we all know, everyone who learns Japanese just adores learning kanji and without how awful it was as a foundation, the modern form of kana wouldn't exist and you'd still pronounce
てゐ as "tewi" using an obsolete character not as "tei" its modern form.
You could also basically fuck importation, partial substitution, loanwords, loan translation, loan formation, loan rendering,loin coinage and loan axionomic definitionary exchange.
Its exactly the same thing, its just language got there first. Perfect reproduction is of course going to lead to perfect reproductions used by different people in different ways.
But to get snarky, it wasn't a perfect reproduction. In fact, it wasn't even obviously sourced: Googling using google's reverse heuristic search revealed some 210 million pages and the first 5 pages didn't reveal source. Even better and far more exciting, its lack of monetization and the use of recontexturalization means its actually covered under fair-use as an imperfect recreation (with around 80% of the source image cropped and around 50% not matching 'exact pixels' due to editing, layering and masking) and as such isn't an infringement -- and wouldn't be an infringement even if it wasn't masked due to its explicit recontexturalization across media (not just because of valid excuse excluding liability of infringement in this case, as aforementioned) because it passes four factor balancing tests of recontexturalization, granting an exception to exclusive rights -- which when you're getting google hits of 210 million, let's be honest -- you don't have exclusive rights to begin with. This is also important given the effect upon the work's value is negliable and the recontexturalization makes the work useless for its original intended purpose, and its just being used as a memetic shorthand for a concept that's replaceable.
tl;dr:
Its only "ripping something off" when you profit from it or claim it was your own.
I would have thought the fact its the site's background wallpaper would mean we'd have some licence to use it and the source context would have been reaaaaally obvious (to the point where I assumed it wasn't even worth me researching it) but apparently no.
Tyler, you make magic. Keep up the good work my dude.
Moderator in question, study culture and copyright law.
Have a nice album made of literally nothing but recontexturalized samples.