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Shutting Out The World
© Bernard McGuigan 2009.
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I bumped into a friend, who makes hand made soaps and she asked me whether I had licensed my work to a soap mould manufacturer. Turns out she had seen a soap mould on the internet which looked very similar.
I went home to investigate. After some quick web research there it was an almost identical image of my sculpture 'Shutting Out The World' - one tenth of the size and made out of rubber silicone at a wholesale price of just £5.
I soon discovered it was being sold at thirty retail sites across the world from the U.S. to Hong Kong! With some further investigation we found the culprit in America. A couple of days went by - I called a good friend who is a lawyer (and an American) practising British Law at a city firm. As a friend he said he'd look into the matter, but warned me of the difficulty of taking action in the States (quite slow and expensive).
He hit upon the idea of writing a very strong warning letter to the two UK retailers. We hoped they would get in touch
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with their supplier in the States - the mould manufacturer and wholesaler.
After a few days they contacted me by e-mail. I'll give them their dues, they came clean and held their hands up. They wanted to come to a licensing agreement that would see me getting a percentage of the value of the moulds sold from their inception (a couple of years back) up to the present.
I am just about to sign the contract and I will still retain my copyright under this agreement. I have made it sound fairly straightforward, but it wasn't and there were many phone calls and e-mails and it probably took several weeks to sort out and get an agreement.
So to anybody else out there who thinks their work has been copied, it is well worth pursuing - not for the money you understand, but just because it is the right thing to do. Do you copy? Over and out.
Bernard McGuigan is a sculptor and a regular Payback claimant.
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