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I am taking this opportunity to thank my friend, Adilah Bakar, who discovered about the illustrations, my lawyer Mr Harris Abdullah for the speedy demand letter, and to all who have given me support throughout this copyright issue. Thank you so much.
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Despite having a mild fever, I forced myself up this morning and went with my husband to meet the owner of Swensen’s Cafe (SC), Mr Tan Lian Ann, a very soft spoken man with a sweet face. When we came, he was in a meeting and apologised that he had to attend to us a bit late. He greeted us with a smile and invited us to his room. We talked about the issue regarding my illustrations that appeared on the calendar that his company produced as giveaway to customers. SC entrusted the graphic designer with all their creative works without knowing that the designer has a shortfall of not being able to illustrate by himself. They fired him two days after they got my e-mail. I felt sorry that the designer had to learn the hard way. But I guess he learned the lesson well, not to simply take images from the internet. Like Mr Brad said, “The default you should assume for other people’s works is that they are copyrighted and may not be copied unless you know otherwise.”

Anyway, we settled the issue amicably with help from HKM lawyers and came to an agreement that I give him the right to use my five characters for a year, for a total amount that I am not going to disclose. Mr Tan has thought this over as he didn’t want to think it as him being penalised for what his former employee did and for me not to profit from his misfortune. That is good enough for me and I agreed.

It is sad to learn that all calendars have been destroyed.

Before coming to see Mr Tan, I did a background check on him. Well, what can I do, am a big fan of Magnum PI. I found out that he is a Chess Champion so I asked him about it. He smiled and talked enthusiastically about chess. He was a chess prodigy at the age of 9 and reigned supreme in the 1950s and 60s as the Singapore and Malayan Chess Champion. He traveled the world to play in chess tournaments and in 1973, he was awarded International Master.

My husband and I had fun listening to his story and before we left, I showed him my illustrations portfolio and since he has no graphic designer, he told me that he might want me to illustrate for him. Since his company deals with a lot of kiddies stuff (Nuk and Lego), he said it’s a blessing that we meet each other as my expertise is in children illustration.

I am glad to have met Mr Tan today.

Thanks to my good buddy, Adilah, I came to know about the artwork theft.

You can find my Raya Girl here: Raya Girl @ Emila’s Littleshop, portfolio, and Raya cards for PTS. I granted PTS a license to use and distribute (one-time usage, they need to get back to me for reprints).They paid me for the licensing, why can’t others?

Previously, I did not put watermark on my images. I take pride in my work and really like people to enjoy my illustrations in a fresh form. Once in a while I mentioned about the copyright in individual posts but overall, the terms of use has been there on my sidebar every single day without fail since 2006. If you have traveled hours on the Internet to find my blog/pages, please at least make time to look and read the terms of use. This not only apply to my blog, it apply to others as well. ALWAYS.

I am going to do something, to take action. This is to  create awareness to all parties (the company/ies and the designer/s) to really work together on creating the artwork.

This is what I have to say:

To the company/companies:
“You should monitor the design process right from the sketching part, down to the finished work.”

To the designer/s:
“Graphic designing is not about searching artwork from the internet and integrate it in your work. Graphic designing is about doing your work from scratch.”

Updates: I discovered another page of the calendar that has my girls on it.

These are my girls, Norah, Emot posing with their bestfriends, Pumpkin the Cat and Dixie Bird.

And they appeared without consent on the calendar:

This is my raya girl:

And she appeared without consent on the calendar:

I know, when I put them all up in my blog, they’ll appear in the google search. And google, being a giant search engine always has this remark: “This image may be subject to copyright.” And people who search for images, sometimes are being just plain ignorant. They copied it down directly without giving thoughts of checking the website/blog for information regarding the images.

Click above image to enlarge

Today, I went to Genting Highland and found out that my merdeka girl illustration is being used as photostated greeting cards by BION SB Management as greeting cards and they stapled some pieces over their ticketing counter.

I did mentioned in my TERMS OF USE, that:

You can:

1. use (as is) my illustrations/photos/verses to accompany your posts.

2. download and print as personal greeting cards; to share any illustrations/photos/verses with other individuals you care about.

In all cases, my name, Emila Yusof with link to my blog https://emilayusof.com MUST be included.

POSTS in this context are BLOG POSTS.

PERSONAL GREETING CARDS literally means just that; personal greeting cards. They cannot be seen as public decorations or as such, including photostated ones.

INDIVIDUALS YOU CARE ABOUT means your mother, father, sister, grandfather, grandmother, brother, cousin, second cousin, auntie, uncle as such. PUBLIC is so not included.

According to dictionary, the word PERSONAL is a definition that means “relating to somebody’s private life: relating to the parts of somebody’s life that are private”.

I am putting this explanation up in my terms-of-use page.