Update #1: Pirated book situation

Nice, if every day 2500 potential buyers of this book manage to learn the truth about it, I hope those “creative” publishers will go bankrupt. They’ll mourn the paper on which they printed what they stole!

More power to you!

…I still think you should go ahead and publish the book…

Put ‘THE ORIGINAL…’ in the front page title, sell it for a few cents less than the fake book asking price, and have photographed head shots of ALL the original artists. I’d buy that book.
Maybe create a website to promote the original book and rip the fake book and the publishers to shreds! The book is NOT being sold on Amazon, and most likely all other reputable book sellers are NOT holding the fake book.

Take heart my friend, they wont get away with this, and you have the full support of the art community behind you…

Tx
London, UK

@ Tekura

I too like the ironic poetic justice behind the idea of “pirating the pirates” but as Darren pointed out already: The entire contents of the book (and so much more) are already available for free on his website. Which, of course, is where it was pirated from in the first place! :)

There is, however, a project in the works, spawned by this very act. Stay tuned!

Hey Luc,
thanks for the info,
realy appreciate it!

Hi Luc;

I’ve read your posts and the comments on this topic with interest. I put all my writing and photography on the web, and I’ve seen people use and abuse some of them in the past.

I live in a part of the world that gets the majority of its imports from China, so I thought I might put things into context:

Chinese companies like this ‘publisher’ don’t care about anything but turning out the cheapest items possible. Intellectual property is a nonsensical term to them. Many people have suggested lawyering up, and you’ve wisely noted that it would be futile. You’re right. Nobody at any level of the food chain in China gives a rat’s patootie that the book is not legit. Of course it’s not legit! If it were, they couldn’t afford to sell it.

And booksellers buying such an obvious knock-off? They look at the price, see that it’s incredibly cheap (’Wow! Did the publisher make a mistake?’), so they figure they’ll throw a couple of copies in the front window and make a few extra bucks for themselves this month. It’s stupid, short-sighted and self-serving, I know. But people can sometimes be like that.

Unfortunately, everything you put online, ever, is able to be repackaged and sold by someone. While I understand your outrage, I think that, from a technical perspective at least, you need to consider that if it’s visible on the Web, it’s already gone.

I know that seeing the stuff published in a book makes it about 28 times worse. (I don’t generally charge for anything online, but I seldom allow anything to be published in print for free.) Nonetheless, I think your only choice in this regard is to continue enlisting people in this global game of whack-a-mole.

It won’t be 100% successful, but it’s all you can do, really.

You’re not alone in this, by the way. In China, anything and everything that can be copied cheaply is copied, packaged and sold, from movies to clothes to cars. Frankly, you’d be amazed.

The worst part of it is that someone somewhere is going to buy the book, see the incredibly poor quality reproduction, and conclude that you’re not much of an artist. This kind of publicity is just the thing to let everyone know the truth.

Best of luck.

[...] There has been two new developments on this situation described here and here. Glad that the event is working [...]