A few days ago I was on Twitter where I network with a lot of artists. Somehow I noticed that John T. Unger an artist who makes Artisanal Firebowls had ended up with some legal troubles. I have followed his work for some time and always thought one of his wonderful pieces would look great in my yard.

I need your help. My original art has been copied by a manufacturer who is now suing me in federal court to overturn my existing copyrights and continue making knockoffs. I have a strong case, a great lawyer and believe that if I can continue to defend myself, the case will be resolved in my favor. If I run out of funds before we reach trial, a default judgment would be issued against me and could put me out of business. I don’t believe my opponent can win this case in court and I don’t believe he really intends to try. I believe his goal is to use strong-arm litigation tactics to force me to keep spending money or risk losing my copyrights — not by true adjudication, but by default if he is able to outspend me.

Original source here

Over the next 24 hrs amazing things started to happen:

• Somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 tweets went out about this.
• He raised over $5000 to help his cause by selling some new art pieces as a kickstart project.
• The page telling his story had nearly 50,000 page views.
• A new hash tag at twitter started to be used #defendart

I have a multi-author blog at www.grimvisions.com and I asked one of the bloggers there to write about what was happening. We published it, and I also went onto a few of the art forums I frequent and posted about his troubles there. Some of the people in response put it on their Deviant Art profiles. That’s just what I did, there were 100′s maybe 1000′s of people doing similar things to get the word out. A case like his affects all artists in one way or another.

Sometimes other peoples stories really connect with me. John’s plight had affected me. I started thinking about how I could help more. I couldn’t really contribute more funds. But I could contribute time and art. So yesterday I called him and offered both. We had a very good conversation.

A large group of like minded individuals can achieve great things.

So if you are interested in helping out you can:

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