Carlton Books’ Unofficial Sonic Book May Have Stolen Watermarked Art & Material From Sonic Fan Websites

18 June, 2019 9 September, 2023

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Oh dear:

So I didn't notice this earlier…

But they've not actually bothered to put captions on most of the images in the book. pic.twitter.com/TMVxpmcajE

— Dave Luty (Badnik Mechanic) (@DaveLuty) June 18, 2019

So I was curious about something, as predicted, the book has also stolen/plagiarised articles and text from various Sonic fansites.

Mainly the Sonic fandom wiki but I'm sure other sites like Sonic Stadium and Retro might spot some of their articles in it too.

— Dave Luty (Badnik Mechanic) (@DaveLuty) June 18, 2019

It gets worse… The person who wrote this book (Jane Kent) appears to have pretty much lifted entire segments of articles from various Sonic fan sites in order to write it. pic.twitter.com/xPIwgaBzBW

— Dave Luty (Badnik Mechanic) (@DaveLuty) June 18, 2019

Well I'm pretty sure it's not illegal to make something which is either parody or unofficial so long as you explicitly state it.

But that doesn't excuse the art theft and the plagiarism.

— Dave Luty (Badnik Mechanic) (@DaveLuty) June 18, 2019

Well I can confirm that the render on the cover is indeed a fan made render that they've stolen https://t.co/hH0F4o1Oxw
Funnily enough it was in my dA favourites so no wonder it looked so familiar to me.

— SunkythePootis (@SunkythePootis) June 18, 2019

This post was originally written by the author for TSSZ News.

2 Comments

People that wrote the original articles and the fan art should take action and try to sue this company….

Hifihedgehog says:

19 June, 2019 at 10:18 AM

The problem is that if those fans (1) do not have a copyright on their material and (2) their content is on non-profit fan sites to boot and (3) the content is based on and derived from a for-profit, trademarked and copyrighted video game, it will be extremely difficult to claim ownership so their case would hold up in a court of law. Legally speaking, they may very well have no standing but ethically speaking, this is of course underhanded and disgusting behavior on the part of the author and the publisher.

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