Internet Art Theft
Published by beartist January 23rd, 2008 in ArtNow, this is one of those stories, when all you can say is “OMG…”
I just read on Luc Latulippe’s blog that someone scraped the contents of Darren Di Lieto’s (The Little Chimp Society) website and published it into a book which is sold online for $100.
This book (“published” in Hong Kong under the title “Colorful Illustrations 93°C”) reprints without permission several dozen artist interviews, which Darren had posted on his blog, including the artwork.
Apparently it even includes a CD with all the illustrations from the book, all stolen off the site as well. Here’s a link to a gallery of scans that Darren made of each page of the book.
This is not only wrong, but it could be a worrying trend and quite a bit more problematic than it appears. In countries like China, where counterfeits flourish and copyright laws are practically non-existent, it seems pretty easy to steal any content from the Internet and publish it in a book form. What can a poor artist or a writer do?
Well, one of the good thing of the Internet is the ability to INFORM.
thanks for the info, i will not buying this. anyway there is still million piracy in cyberworld, but i dont know what is real and not real, thanks anyway
yep, can’t argue the fact that there is rampart thievery on the internet. And the fans of cartoonists don’t realize that their pilfering is putting the cartoonists that they admire at a disadvantage. What an irony. Still, many fans don’t even know some of this stuff is illegal; they figure it’s put out by the legitimate publisher. One fan wrote to me to compliment me on my work, which was obviously fake, and was shocked when i alerted him to the fact. He promptly went out and bought some real copies of my work… You’ll always have some scoundrels who don’t care. But it’s up to us to try and educate the public — it shouldn’t fall on our shoulders to do it, but who else is going to?
Best to all.
Chris Hart
This is very bad. Even if I’m at the bookshop, I won’t even know it contained pirated art.