KAZAKHSTAN NOTE DESIGNERS ACCUSED OF PLAGIARISM

Marcel Burkhard, a Swiss photographer, is arguing that a seagull that appears on the latest version of a 500 tenge ($1.50) Kazakh banknote is a carbon copy of one he photographed over a decade ago. That photograph appears on the Russian-language Wikipedia article for “gulls” and is labelled as “an ordinary gull”.

Officials in the land-locked Central Asian country where Russian is widely spoken have failed to acknowledge copyright infringement despite a social media-driven outcry. But tellingly they have belatedly suggested that “with time” the design of the banknote will be changed.

On December 4, according to Kazakh media, Burkhard wrote on Facebook:

On Friday I received a message from a Kazakh social media user, [who said] that on a new Kazakhstan banknote there is a seagull similar to my photograph. I examined the banknote and, truly, it seems to be one and the same gull. To compare, I cut out the seagull from my photograph and inserted it onto [a copy of] a banknote. Every detail matches and for that reason I am confident that the image is one and the same.

Kazakh banknote with Marcel Burkhard's Seagull Superimposed

By December 5, with accusations of plagiarism still doing the rounds on social media, the bank said the design of the banknote would change “with time” and that symbols for the banknote would be exclusively hand-drawn to prevent possible falsification.

There was no immediate confirmation that the seagull would be removed from the note, however.

Although it was largely the troublesome bird that caught the eye of Kazakh social media users, many were even more bemused to find out that a business centre called Moskva (Moscow) in Kazakhstan's capital Astana had found its way onto the same 500 tenge banknote.

To read the complete article, see:
What Future for the ‘Wikipedia Seagull’ on Kazakhstan's Brand New Banknotes? (https://globalvoices.org/2017/12/08/what-future-for-the-wikipedia-seagull-on-kazakhstans-brand-new-banknotes/#)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web