Simian Substitute Site for May 2008: The Little Chimp Society

Well, the 'no reprint' policy won't last much longer - probably a day or two maximum, if I'm honest - but there should also be a reasonable amount of new material to look forward to this month. One travel piece, working to a slightly lower budget than usual: one DVD review, to celebrate a very belated movie re-release: one analysis of the latest in cult TV, as promised last month: and one Polish music roundup that everyone assumes I'm joking about. All coming up in the next 31 days, hopefully.

Meanwhile, your Simian Substitute Site for May 2008 is The Little Chimp Society. I'm not quite sure where they got the name from, other than to give themselves a rather cute logo. But the LCS is a portal where illustrators can show off their work and offer their services for hire, so there are new examples of terrific eye candy posted up daily.

The Little Chimp Society has been in the interweb news recently, and the reasons why have been documented by site boss Darren Di Lieto on his blog, one with the equally-valid-as-a-Simian-Site name Apefluff. Di Lieto conducts regular interviews with illustrators for the site, and he's rather proud of them. So you can imagine his distress when he discovered in mid-April that a Chinese company is currently publishing a book called Colorful Illustrations 93°C, which is made up entirely of his interviews and the associated illustrations. The company Great Creativity Organization (arf!) is charging people USD100 a pop for the book, without crediting Di Lieto or reimbursing the artists.

I admit that this site sometimes pushes the boundaries of Fair Use when it reproduces other people's work: but I always try to make sure everyone gets credited, and I certainly don't charge money for it. So it's good to see that Di Lieto is taking steps to get revenge. By April 23rd he'd traced the book back to a supplier in Guangzhou called Sendpoints Books: by April 24th he'd managed to block further online sales: and best of all, on April 30th he invoiced Sendpoints Books for over GBP10,000 for use of the interviews. He's also provided the company's contact details on the blog, so that all the ripped-off illustrators can send in their invoices as well. Di Lieto's given them 30 days to pay up (with an interest rate of 10% a day after that), so keep an eye on Apefluff during May to see how he gets on with that.

Still, enough of that for now: it's comments time!