No, No, No …
We talked before about the fine line between stealing and creativity (here and here), but I wanted to share this egregious violation of intellectual property law and common decency. You can find the long version of the story here in a blog post titled “Christian Thieves,” but I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. Basically, a designer/blogger named Jimi designed a really cool T-shirt graphic he named “Revelations.” While one T-shirt company paid him for the right to print and sell shirts featuring his design, a Christian T-shirt company just grabbed the design (either off a shirt or the web) and began selling it.
Sigh.
After the Christian T-shirt company was bombarded by hate mail from Jimi’s fans and friends, the company took down the shirt and apologized (in other words, they stopped when they got caught). While apologies are all well and good, the way I see it, the damage has been done, the company’s reputation is forever ruined, and we have to add another incident to the Christians Behaving Badly list.
So why do people who worship the Creator of the universe shy away from creating? Why do people who argue for the Ten Commandments to appear in public buildings (and on network TV) ignore “Thou Shalt Not Steal” when it suits them? I’m not sure. You could suggest the “fallen people/fallen world” idea, but that doesn’t quite work for me this time. Instead, I propose that we as broken people work toward building a Church where it isn’t acceptable to associate theft and Christianity. As church leaders who regularly employ technology and the arts, let that work begin with us.
Matt, here is a link to the conversation over at Emptees regarding this whole situation. Jimi actually posted the apology email the guy sent. It’s people like that who give “Creative Christians” a bad name…or even a name at all. http://emptees.com/posts/2754-major-major-manticores-thanks-removed
posted at 9:14 am on April 29th, 2008 by Dan