UH-UH OH NO YOU DON’T! NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY!

For most of my career I have written for Home Cinema Choice magazine as well as writing about car electronics. Moreover my mother was an author and had 92 books in print at peak! I fitted in nicely with HCC and their antipiracy culture because my privileged education was paid for out of royalties from my mother’s books mostly. The free and easy attitude to intellectual property upon the Internet in general has always rankled with me. It has been the only thing that I’ve ever truly disagreed with, with some of my new Internet colleagues. I guess you either torrent or you don’t…
Funnily enough, ‘poaching’ has been in the fishing news this week as well. A celebrity and furthermore sponsored angler took a photograph of himself with a magnificent fish that he had caught in a site of special scientific interest in an out of bounds area of a famous lake. The 52 pound fish was known and has a name. The trouble is he had been nicked twice before for pre-baiting and fishing in the illegal area. The resultant trophy photograph earned him an £860 fine in the magistrates’ court and he is now burning around social media in the fishing world. Some approve of the poaching, some are enraged.
But working as a ‘creative’ is not fishing. It is a privilege and terribly hard to get to do as a main source of income. So any photographer, graphic designer, musician or any other kind of artist that pays for their food and shoes with their practice, feels as if they had been stolen from if other people use their output without paying.
No Limits Events and Promotions run the Modified Nationals car show and have done for well over a decade now. I presented on their main stage and for the live arena acts as well as the main prize-giving for many years, until the dance music scene took over their main stage. They are well seasoned promoters and use many routes to publicise their show. I particularly love the show car which has different graphics and stuff inside every year. Their publicity material is cool as well and with the addition of the HotRod show, complete with emphasis on the ink and fashion and its own website, as well as flyers, they had a distinctly different stylish demographic at the show this year as well as the regular showgoers.
None of this was an accident.
If you get to work for No Limits Events, you will show off about it – they will show up on your curriculum vitae. This year’s HotRod show flyer was a doozy. So when that same flyer showed up, on Facebook for an event run by a town council on the south coast, being a blatant rip-off of the Modified Nationals flyer, you can understand the original promoters being a bit upset. However, and what really caused the grief, poor old Fawlty Towers town failed to get their event off the ground. So the next thing was that that stolen flyer now had the word CANCELLED written across it diagonally! In terms of potential damage to the original show’s image, this was 24 karat.
At first, the volunteers involved with the show didn’t want to respond. I am afraid I waded in, with a passive aggressive message so unpleasant, I think I scared them pootless and in moments flat they had revealed who the soi disant graphic designer was.
I do know that the boss made the kind of call once described by Mike Edwards of Kenwood when he had to tell somebody on Twitter who was confusing the kitchen equipment company with the car electronics company in a very unfavourable manner, as the “how very dare you” phone call.
Below for your delectation, are three images. First the flyer originally as designed, then the monkey-rip copy, then the one with ‘cancelled’ all over it:




I honestly don’t know if the designer has been able to invoice this Herbert more money for use of his artwork, but in any case and as a general warning to others, I publish this here as a cautionary tale. You can’t nick stuff from a massive car show and not expect to get noticed!
/moral lesson….