Yesterday I wrote about an issue close to my heart, artists’ rights. Copyright for creative content is a vitally important thing for an artist. It is the only legal thing in place that is supposed to protect our creativity from being taken away by others which subverts the artist’s ability to make a living. If an artist cannot make a living with their art, then they lose the time to bring more creative joy and innovation to the world. Thanks to your actions yesterday, one more artist can continue to create.
Yesterday, many of you came here to read about my friend Dave Bowman’s (Design Turnpike) struggle with trying to get Hobby Lobby to recognize that they were wrongfully selling a reproduction of his handmade artwork, and you were not just content to read about it – you continued to make some noise about the issue by sharing it on social media. Well, it worked.
(Read the original post by clicking here!)
After countless blog hits, comments and shares about this issue, Hobby Lobby has reached out in a very different tone and begun the process of arranging a settlement with Design Turnpike to resolve the matter. I’m sure that they get many frivolous complaints as any large corporation would, but due in part to the noise we made, they realized that this was a legitimate issue that needed to be rectified.
Hobby Lobby has made a nice financial offer to Design Turnpike, and is refraining from ordering more stock. They believe the two blocks of product they did order have already sold out. They maintain it was an innocent oversight, and after some investigating, it does seem the majority of the wrongdoing was by a Chinese vendor.
Thank you Hobby Lobby for stepping up to do what is right!
Also, thanks to everyone for standing up for artists’ interests and keeping big corporations honest!