Apologies

We've both been working 16-17 hour days, seven days a week and have been too tired to blog – hence the silence. We'll probably be back on track in mid March some time so we'll been blogging sporadically till that time and be fully on board from then. In the meantime ... watch the space above for some recent discoveries.

Assumptions Leading to Online Copyright Breach [UPDATED: 4/12/09]

I have to say... I am constantly appalled at the presumptive attitude people have online that posted images on my online gallery are a free-for-all. Below is a recent example, and my response.

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Hello Jozef,
my name is [NAME DELETED] and I am from [CITY/COUNTRY DELETED]. I am an astrologer, and since I have also DevianArt profile, I took your photo for ilustrating my post on my astrology site. I also put your link but what I need is written permission, so that's it... If it's not ok, just tell me.

I know that I should ask first, but sincerly, like a lot of other bloggers neither do I ask permission for a long time, not because I didn't want, but because I thought it is enough if i put a link. But now, l really want to respect copyrights, so I am sending emails to all authors which are linked with photos on my page...
hope to hearing from you,

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Dear [NAME],

Thanks for contacting me.

Bloggers that post images without permissions, regardless if it is common practice or not are illegally breaking copyrights. Your usage without permissions is also unlawful, and the presumption that permission will be given is exactly that... presumptuous.

I make my artwork as part of my living and therefore usage of my artwork has a cost to it. I can and do post my own images online, but they are used thus only to showcase my work, their posting is not an open invitation for others to use illegally.

Also blog usage is usually to showcase an artists work, giving critical review (and often permission is openly granted for reviews), but you have decided to use my artwork to illustrate your astrology site as the header image. That is definitely not the usage I created this artwork for.

Beyond that inappropriate usage, this artwork of "The Queen of Sheba" is actually NOT my copyright but that of Aristocrat Technologies Australia (an international multimillion dollar poker machine company), and even has on the artwork.. "NOT FOR REPRODUCTION"... that means both online and in print, and that message is meant for persons like yourself. I have had a long legal history with this company to win the rights of usage of this artwork, which has been both financially and personally costly, and ONLY I have the usage rights, those usage rights are NOT transferable to you. So even if I wanted to give you the rights of usage for my artwork, I can NEVER give permissions for anyone else to use this artwork, as I do not have that right. (the rights I have mean only I can can use it).

So, thanks for contacting me. Please REMOVE my artwork immediately from your site header, and if in the future you wish to use my or anyone else's artwork... seek permission FIRST before you use the work illegally as you have done here. Please confirm in an email that you have done this.

If there is a problem for the removal, I will be happy to forward your permission request (after your already established illegal usage) to the lawyers at Aristocrat, whom I can say will be decidedly less polite then myself about the illegal usage of their copyright owned artwork.

Thank you.

Best,
Jozef Szekeres

Good Elf~Fin News Blog Post

The wonderful Colleen Doran has devoted an entire post on her A Distant Soil blog to our upcoming Elf~Fin series and added some very kind words indeed. Thanks, Colleen – we really appreciate your support and that of our readers who have been standing by for a long time to see this series come to fruition.

Jozef's Artwork Posted on a Blog Without Permission or Credit [UPDATED: 3/8/09]

One of my artworks has been posted uncredited on this blog: http://tresfabsweetie.blogspot.com/

I titled the cowboy character in pink that wears a "GAY" buckle – "Gay Ranger". I'm usually fine with people using my artwork online, providing they request permission. I also insist that the artwork is properly copyright credited and attributed to me with links to my website such as the example below:

© 2009 Jozef Szekeres
www.elf-fin.deviantart.com/

What is most concerning in this case is that the person who appropriated my art also removed my signature from my piece with dodgy Photoshop (see the pic on this blog post). Here is my original link of the artwork on Deviant Art so you can compare.

UPDATE: 4/08/09
The offending blogger has removed my artwork from his blog without applogy or comment.

Back to Blogging

Apologies for the lack of blog posting during the last week – my MacBook has been in the shop for the last few days because there was something wrong with the Ethernet connection. I couldn't get onto the Internet, let alone send or receive any emails – very frustrating. I just got it back yesterday afternoon, only to find out it would have cost me a pretty penny ($1295 to be exact!) to replace the mother board had I not been covered under the extended AppleCare Protection Plan. It was worth every penny of the funds I outlaid when I initially bought the computer. Anyway, Jozef and I are getting back to the regular business of blogging as of now and we'll be writing multiple posts to make up for lost time. Thanks for your patience.

Weekly Status Report

We apologise profusely for not blogging for an entire week but we have been extraordinarily busy focusing on activities that took longer to complete than we had anticipated. Here is a quick rundown:

●   Jozef has taken a slice of our workshop/seminar Powerpoint Presentation and has added new visuals and examples to it. He is presenting two one hour workshops this coming weekend at the Australian Society of Authors Picture Book Creators' Retreat and another which is being held at the South Australian Writers' Centre. He has done a stellar job of the new content.

●   I have been doing lots of legal research pertaining to an initiative we will be implementing in the next couple of months (we think you'll like it!).

●   I have also just set up a new blog (which will soon have an accompanying information website) in the next couple of weeks, which has to do with my personal commitment to animal welfare – in this case to the rehabilitation of feral cats. If you are interested, you can check it out at www.tameferalcats.blogspot.com.

●   On top of that, I have been buying up a whole bunch of domain names on behalf of Black Mermaid™, as well as Jozef and myself which pertain to future publications and activities.

●  Jozef has also been madly working on a double page spread of Elf~Fin.

● I have also managed to get a night of R & R after a long dry social period due to constant work commitments. I went to see a Popcorn Taxi sponsored 35mm screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark (my favourite film of all time) which also featured an audience with the incomparable Karen Allen who looks great and amused everyone with anecdotes about filming in Tunisia in 120 degree heat where everyone bar Stephen Spielberg (who had tins of food shipped in to the set) got food poisoning or "Montezuma's Revenge" as she put it. She also said the monkey in the film was exceedingly bad tempered but that was because he was working in the heat when all he wanted to do was curl up in the cool and sleep. She talked about the famous scimitar scene, the snakes, as well as the audition and casting process. 

I am very tired. Will sleep now. And will get on normal blogging track tomorrow.

Welcome and Thank You Blog Visitors

A few weeks ago we installed Google Analytics onto our blogspot to see who was popping in to visit. We've been maintaining the blog for five months now and having a great time doing it but felt it was, in general, a one way conversation – not even a dialogue really except for those people who have taken time out to post comments. However, we were quite thrilled at the scope of the Analytics analysis with all its graphs, maps and stats. People weren't necessarily commenting but they were visiting. We had expected readers from Australia and the US mostly, and we were right in our assessment. This is by no means a contest but the USA came out on top with our homeland in second place within the Top 10. We were also delighted to see who took out the next eight positions, which are (in order) – Germany, Netherlands, the UK, Norway, Canada, Italy, France and Malaysia. Beyond that we also had visitors from Russia, New Zealand, Spain, Greece, Japan, Brazil, Belgium, Singapore, the Philipines, Romania, Indonesia, Hungary, India, South Africa, Sweden, Netherlands (Antilles), Finland and Saudi Arabia. We are very gratified and just want to say thank you for supporting us in cyberspace. We hope you'll make this a regular web pit stop in your busy day or week. Too bad we can't offer you real tea and biscuits because we sure would like to  ... maybe we can send you some virtual ones if we ever figure out how to do it!

Blog Web Browser Problems

Oh my lordy us! We just accessed our blog via Internet Explorer instead of our usual web browser – Safari. Everything is topsy turvy. Our template no longer exists. The YouTube videos are not showing up. The font is all in upper case. Everything but the blog heading is left justified and there is a big white empty canvas of space on the right hand side. We are not really computer savvy but we thought we were doing pretty well until now. Will have to go into the Blogger Help menu and see what in the hell is going on. And we'll have to check other browsers as well to see if they are bringing up nonsense. Apologies to everyone out there if this is what you've been looking at up to now. We'll do everything we can to rectify the problem so you can see what we're seeing.

29/8/08 UPDATE: Spoke to our webmaster who told us that the Mac Internet Explorer was an old version and and had not been supported or updated by Microsoft for many years, resulting in these blog layout problems. So there's the answer. When we checked our blog on Firefox, Safari and Windows Explorer everything was cool. 

Whedon Wonder

The ever reliable ICv2 website has just reported another Joss Whedon initiative – Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog – a three-act musical starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day that will premiere on the Internet. Act 1 will debut on Tuesday 15 July (oops-I missed it!), Act 2 on Thursday 17 July, and Act 3 on Saturday 19 July 2008. The entire musical will remain online till Sunday 20th. I love Broadway and Hollywood musical, as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer so I remember the musical episode in the latter "Once More With Feeling" with great affection – this may prove to be just as good. 

Spacing Style Gaffes

The obsessive perfectionist editor in me is becoming extremely frustrated at the line-spacing slip ups in our blog postings. As you can see from our recent posts, the style spontaneously changes from single spacing to one-and-a-half spacing and it is NOT a pretty sight at least to my eyes. On the new postings page we can apply justification, font size and type and other stylistic choices to our text, but we can't do the same for line-spacing. I am assuming that a particular style of line-spacing is imbedded as a default into the template, but alas it is not working out that way. Once I publish the new posts,  for some reason the template changes the line-spacing midway into the text. I have looked on the blogger Help menu and apparently this is not an isolated problem – many other neophytes and blogging pros are experiencing the same phenomenon (and I only thought that Microsoft Word had the capacity to change your layout midway through a document without any prompts from the author!) Unfortunately I cannot find a practical solution or even instructions on how to bring consistency into the blog page. Will keep trying but in the meantime, are there any Black Mermaid readers out there that can miraculously come up with the answer?

17 June 2008 UPDATE: Some time in the last week or so, all the line spacing problems through our entire blog have mysteriously resolved themselves. Thank you to the style fairy out there in the wild yonder who took care of it.