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This Blog is a personal record and an honest illustration of my life as a full time embroidery artist. I hope that you find it entertaining and inspiring.

ALL IMAGES
shown here are the Copyright of Louise Gardiner 2012.

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Hot Property?

Another intellectual property /copyright issue..... thats the 2nd in two weeks.  


An international cake decoration and craft magazine has published this, 
a 6 page feature called 'Retail Therapy'.

A compliment?  
If I had been asked ... or mentioned ... or even ....paid?!   



"Retail Therapy - A styish trendy, royal iced handbag cake from LR, who uses traditional skills to create a very modern cake for Mother's Day that can be used for so many other special occasions."


Same Title.


Technique


Even a drawn template.


My design published with Woodmansterne. 




It upsets me to realise that people so blatantly take other peoples ideas and pass them off as their own.   It is completely off my moral radar.



April 26th 2012.
I would just like to say that I have had adequate apologies from the publisher of this magazine who kindly dealt with this issue of plagiarism and took responsibility for her contributors actions.  I was also awarded £800 recompense after a long and extremely tiresome escapade which took hours out of my studio work. 

YOU MUST FIGHT YOUR CORNER and protect your work.

It is important to BE ORIGINAL in your creativity and to respect people's property and give credit where it is due.    


It was a learning curve, both this incident and the incident two weeks prior to this when an ex student of mine had copied my style completely and sent it to my publishers and God knows were else ... 
Lets hope that is the last of it... 
but sadly I doubt it.  






9 comments:

  1. Unbelieveable. What the hell is wrong with some people!?

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  2. OMG I can't believe how blatant this is!!! The cake design is almost identical to your embroidery!!! Shocking:o

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  3. I know this happens, but I'm still shocked every time I see that it does. :0(

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  4. Another shameless cheat, incredible! The magazine should (at least) print an apology. I wonder if these people believe that stupid old myth that if you change three things in a design it no longer infringes copyright? Or just don't see anything wrong with stealing others' original work.

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  5. Far too similar to be a coincidence !! And as you say, if you had even been mentioned or credited would have been the polite thing to do.

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  6. Have they said how they came by the design? It seems far to similar to be coincidence! They must be red faced about it. They should offer you an opportunity in the mag if they don't pay you!

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  7. Thats not fair! Being an artist is such a struggle and you at least deserve to be asked permission for your image to be used or be mentioned in the magazine. You have worked extremely hard to get where you are today and it is cheating to steal an image like that.

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  8. What a shame, it's a very obvious and direct copy. Hard to take as a compliment but good that you're letting people know about it, it might be the only way to make people stop doing it.

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  9. Thanks for all your support ... Having talked to other artists and illustrators this happens a lot more than I realised and it is important to debate this issue. Its only down to supportive people bringing my attention to these situations so I am very appreciate of that.

    I am a huge advocate of original creativity and have no objection to using other artists and designers work as INSPIRATION ... to fire one up and aspire to. I do! I am in awe of many artists work, it excites me and keeps me going when I feel bereft of creativity. However, I aim to encourage creative confidence and originality with all my students and to raise awareness about intellectual property and copyright so that people make no mistake about what is or isn't their own to publish. As I have always said on this bloggerobbajob .... it is much more fun to BE CREATIVE AND most of all ORIGINAL! :)

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