I woke up Monday morning to an e-mail from Dr. Manabu Sakamoto of the University of Bristol, a respected paleontologist and paleoartist, who blogs over at
Raptor's Nest and has a gallery of his original work
online. He wrote the ART Evolved e-mail list about the digital theft of some of his work, hoping to alert us all to the importance of copyrighting and clearly stating how you license your work. At first I thought someone had taken something of his and used it without permission - a serious offense in its own right. But as it turned out, the situation was a lot worse.
I won't go into all of the details, as Glendon Mellow of
The Flying Trilobite and
ART Evolved: Life's Time Capsule has taken the liberty (with permission from Dr. Sakamoto) of writing up a summary of the events in the form of
a blog post. I highly suggest that anyone remotely interested in or involved in paleo-art or online rights
take a look at it. We all stand to learn something from this unfortunate situation. I also want to say how proud I am of the ART Evolved community for banding together and acting perfectly appropriate throughout the entire ordeal. In less than 24 hours they were able to take a bad situation, and make it a whole lot better. You guys are awesome.
