Translating the situation in something more concrete may help...

Translating the situation in something more concrete may help...

Posted Aug 6, 2003 9:06 UTC (Wed) by libra (guest, #2515)
Parent article: SCO ready to clean out Linux users for $1399 per CPU (Register)

We are a group of artists, and we like to create big pictures, mostly with our own drawing and painting, but sometime we add in our compositions little pictures inspired by what we find in newspapers and magazines. When our compositions are done we make copies of them and give them to our friends.

We have some success with our art, and our most recent compositions can be seen in various expositions from time to time. Due to that success one day a man, who pretends to be an artist because he drawn some things for newspapers long ago, came accross one of our picture in which he said we included a little part of one of his picture, and he also said we had to pay him for that.

Of course we do not make money from out art, it is not our purpose, we just want our friends to be happy with the big colorfull pictures we make. So we can not pay him, but we proposed him to tell us what were the pictures he pretended we took from him so that we can stop using them in our future compositions, stop expose them and so that we can send our friends new compositions without those pictures to replace their old ones.

The man answered that he did not wanted to do that, he wanted us to pay him, and our friends as well. I also discovered that he was distributing copies of our art himself, even thought this copies shall certainly contain the pictures he do not want us to use.

Now we don't know what he really wants, certainly he wants some money from us, thought he hasn't prove to deserve it. Maybe he also want to sell our art alone, while we were giving it to our friends before. Maybe he also want to despair us and our friends by claiming false things.

What is sure to us is that now we have trouble because we can not easily provide new pieces of art to our friend being sure it will not claim them to contain pieces of his own pictures again. Of course we can change our art, and start doing things different, but it will take some time and it may change how people perceive our art and how they like it.

It would be easier if we were knowing what are the pictures involved. We are quite ready to clear our art of anything that shouldn't be in, but we need to know what it is to do so. Moreover we have the feeling that doing so could even be an improvement to our art without changing the core of what make it so much appreciated by others.

But as things are today we have no way to solve this problem, and by this time some people are wondering about the future of what we do and if they shall stop use our art in their house. It is great trouble to us, because the core of our art remains safe, and is still worth being know as "art", "good art" and even "our good art" so far.

Anyway we are not going to stop doing art, because it is our purpose in life to be artists, and we can not stop just because someone tries to frighten us. We just hope something fair and intelligent to happen shortly, but even if we must wait years for that to happen we will continue to create art, because we are real artists, and also because it is quite probable that by the time this man agree to precise his claims, our art will have evolved and improved so much that nothing of what we may have use of what he did will remain in our compositions.

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