Artist Stuart Immonen reports on an annoying internet rip off:

Yesterday, my pal Darren Di Lieto, from The Little Chimp Society website, emailed with some upsetting news. Turns out someone scraped the contents of his website and published it into a 350-page book being sold online for $100. You can read more on this post in Darren’s blog.

This book — which reprints without permission several dozen artist interviews which Darren had posted on the LCS blog — transcribes these interviews word-for-word, including the artwork, and was “published” under the title “Colorful Illustrations 93°C”. The book even includes a CD with all the illustrations from the book, all lifted off the site as well. Here’s a link to a gallery of scans that Darren made of each page of the book, with a close-up below of one of the two spreads which feature the interview Darren did of me (I can’t help but notice the thieves omitted the illustration of the two big gay muscle Daddies, chickens!):


More details in links.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Well I’ll make a comment, Heidi. This is why everyone should register their websites with the Copyright Office, especially if there is valuable material on it which can be repurposed. Now the site owner will have to make a registration before proceeding to suit, but there is nothing to stop a cease and desist letter being sent immediately. There is definitely a reason to move forward against someone who does things like this.

    Registration is cheap insurance against this kind of a rip off. Check http://www.copyright.gov for forms and instructions. I think a website can be registered electronically.

    At the very least, place a copyright notice on your first page to the effect of “All contents copyrighted by me, execpt as otherwise noted. No reproduction, electronic or otherwise, permitted without written license from me.”

Comments are closed.