Copyright is no small matter and ofr one artist it's HUGE right now. I'm not talking about some tiny little inkjet print off of someone's art glued into an art journal in a free youtube video, I'm talking wholesale ripoff of an entire line of piece's being sold at rock bottom prices. Yeah. The fire pit guy is being ripped off. big time and taken to court for his copy write.

Now that is truly bullshit.

The even bigger picture here in this issue is that  it opens up a whole can of worms for every artist. If you can be taken to court to release your copyright so that hacks can imitate you what happens next? Why even bother?

When I wrote about copyright before this is what I meant about an issue. When someone who reproduces your work, allows other to think that they are you, and reproduces your work poorly. Case in point.

I went to a major folk festival some years ago. My friend bought a beautiful cut candle holder- cut with some sort of torch. It was beautiful and phenomenal. It was expensive but the detail was amazing and it cast beautiful shadows. Last summer i went to a craft festival and saw something similar, at about half the price. I had really loved the piece L. had bought so I looked close. It was pretty poorly executed. At first I figured the artist was churning them out. I looked at the 2 people behind the booth. 2 youngish college age kids. Not the slightly older lady and man who were at the other festival. I declined to buy the item, though I'd been lusting after the original for some years, but I certainly didn't want to support these kids at hacking at the originals work.

I implore you, if you give a shit at all about REAL copyright infringement head over to John Tunger's website and pledge a donation to help him. Head to the donation page and pledge. Even if you pledge only $1, help this artist fight the infringement.

Here's how I'm going to help. I will donate the proceeds from the sales of my next 5 book sales (over next 11 days) to the fund. So head to my Artfire account, use my current discount code buy some books and I'll take the profit and donate it to Tunger. We can make some money to help real copyright infringment and stop a terrifying precedent from being set.