Current mood:	disappointed
Entry tags:	abjds, art thief, dollfie, mijn schatje, plagiarism

Regarding Mijn Schatje
Mijn Schatje, a rather successful "artist" who has hosted a couple of art shows and has sells her work on iPod/laptop skins on infectious.com, is an art thief.

She has taken ABJD pictures, both from company stock photos and from owners themselves and has used them without their permission to vector over into what she calls "original" pieces of art.

Some examples of the thievery can be found here. None of the pictures are modified, and neither are her works - the overlay in the middle is to show how both the doll picture and the "art" line up perfectly.

You can see the

Radio has contacted the companies involved asking if they had given permission to Mijn Schatje, and here are their responses:

DIM:
Thank you so much for letting me know about the illegal site using our doll images.
This is very unusual and I never know this.
I will check and do what I can do stop this.
Thank you again and it's very kind of you.
Have a good weekend.
Best wishes,
Denny

Pipos:
Hello^0^
This is intersting because we already met her last year at her homepage.
And we didn\'t give her a permission to use our Baha pictures.
We need to contact her again and make sure about these copies.
Thank you very much for letting us know this fact.

Have a good day!

regards,
PIPOSDOLL

Volks:
Thank you for contacting us regarding this matter.
No, we had not heard of this particular artist, we thank you for
bringing this to our attention.
We will forward your email to our headquarters, and let them know
of the situation and your concerns.
Thank you once again.

Sincerely,

VOLKS USA Web Service Center
VOLKS USA, INC.


LUTS:
Thank you for your message.
It is quite.. shocking;

I am really surprised this artist(???) copied not only our dolls but other many BJD.
We will discuss and prepare a notice about this immediately and we will find any way to prevent it. If we need, we will consider legal action on it.

She was never allowed to use our product, design to make a profit. We will react on it strictly.


We really appreciate your message.
Thanks to you and many of our customers' help, we can keep our right and we will remember that we should return the benefit to customers. :)

Thank you and have a nice day!

It seems that now LUTS is thinking of taking legal action upon Mijn Schatje, as well.

So, there you have it folks. It saddens me to see a person using others' doll photos without permission, much less making money off of it. To give you an idea, her laptop skins sell for about $30, and her "original" prints sell for about $1,0000.

She is making money illegally off of someone else's doll photos.

If this concerns you as much as it does me, please crosspost it on your journal and let people know. It's not right that she touts her work as 100 percent original when it clearly is forged.

Thanks to Tomato, Radio, and Demyx for all their hard work figuring this out.

Crossposted to illuminesce as well.

UPDATE: Leekeworld has also confirmed that she was not given permission for their pictures.

Thank you for your message.
We didn't give her permission.
We will contact to her.
Thanks a lot and have a good day.
From Leekeworld.

To see more about Mijn Schatje's exploits, check out...

+ Stardust Asylum's Blog
+ priestessofnada's entry
+ miaowkitten's entry

[EDIT]
For viewers and those over at NetDiver: a newer, more updated site is available as well:

http://radiotrash.org/mijn/

So far Mijn Schatje has a) claimed originally the works were hers completely, b) later admitted that she had used pictures, but never for tracing, only for her original art, and c) has attempted to provide reference pictures that are different from those on this site, claiming that she had received permission from all those above.