Re: Warning for Stone Manufactering in China

At 02:21 AM 9/1/2006, Jack Hell wrote:

>I am a stone sculpture in Belgium and did an experiment with a stone
>factory, Dingly company, in China.

Jack,
Sorry about your misfortune, but I can't say as how I'm the least bit 
surprised. First of all, you did business with a spammer; that is never a 
good thing. If no one did any business with spammers, spam would fade 
instead of growing- if they don't make money, they won't continue.

Also, the Chinese carving industry has no concept of intellectual property. 
Sculpture Review magazine had an entire issue a couple years ago on 
copyright violations. Artists send one model over to China for an 
inexpensive bronze or marble reproduction, and the company there then turns 
out dozens or hundreds of unauthorized copies. In their view, by giving 
them your model, you are literally giving them your model, with all rights 
included. They also pull photos off the web and claim the work as theirs. 
I've seen photos of my work, and the work of friends of mine in both the US 
and Italy, on quite a number of Chinese sites and in their spams (one site 
even left my copyright info on the photo, they didn't edit it off). In 
addition to claiming they did the work, they quote prices for the finished 
work which often are less than my cost for the raw materials alone. (even 
if they get labor and stone for free, that doesn't cover their transport 
and shipping costs- something is very wrong here). They described to one 
person, who ordered one of my fireplace designs from China instead of 
ordering it from me, that their artisans "carved the marble and then poured 
it in a mould". Caveat emptor.

Walter S. Arnold  * walter@...