My good friend Alex has informed me that his illustrations along with work from many other illustrators have been plagiarized in a book called Colorful Illustrations 93°C. The book is also filled with interviews by Darren di Lieto from The Little Chimp Society. If you see this book DO NOT BUY IT! Notify the store owner that the book is rip off. As a matter of fact, grab the book and throw it in trash!
much appreciated.
Awful news, but not surprising. With the massive rise in art and design blogging, theft and plagiarism is booming too. Its “virtually” impossible to police the net for stolen creative, I am sure there are unscrupulous people all over the world passing off other peoples work as there own. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these illustrations appearing on things like lunch boxes or ipod skins.
One idea to screw this bastard publisher out of “his” money is print an AUTHORIZED version of the same book, with the same layout and same title. All the illustrators involved have to agree to get little or no compensation (since they aren’t anyway). Hopefully this would reduce production cost and help keep the selling price low. The thieves are selling the book for $100, this version should be sold for $25 -$35, underselling the competition. Wishfully making their book a financial failure. The money made from the authorized version would be used to recoup the actual cost of printing and if possible divid the remaining among the illustrators.
Just a fantasy…
PZ, that sounds like an excellent idea but that a huge undertaking. Either way the douche bags responsible for the book need to have their asses handed to them.
No doubt that this is illegal and the people behind this should be responsible for violating copyright laws… but I actually think that the way the problems is currently delt with, is completely wrong. “All publicity is good publicity”, and when something is “wrong” it often become more interesting. The whole “DO NOT BUY IT!”, makes people want to check it out, maybe even buy it. I like the idea PZ came up with, I do not have any constructive idea on how to deal with this… but I am pretty sure, that eventhough this is bad publicity, it sadly might end up being good for the book…
Benjamin I really don’t agree with you. No one should purchase this book. It’s as simple as that. If you do the creators will be making profits off of stolen work. Also, the artists that have had their work stolen could careless about publicity right now.
Your point about no one should buy the book, is something I completely agree with you in. I would not buy the book myself, but my point is that sometimes, when people are encouraged to stay away from something, it suddently becomes way more interesting. I fully understand the consequences of purchasing this book, and I would never support something, that violates the copyright law, and rips-off the artists such as this. But I really believe that bad publicity, if “big enough” has a chance of becoming positive for this book, because people might want to see what this is all about…