As I’ve mentioned before, I’m keeping a running list [part I here, part II here] of BJD companies that I do not deal with because of dishonest, dubious and/or illegal business practices. Now I’ve got a new one for the list: Dollkot. In advertising a custom sculpting service, Dollkot committed a pile of egregious offenses. Instead of showcasing their own sculptors’ talents and results, they used photos from DIM’s MiniMee project to illustrate their concept.
Okay, that’s dishonest, but it gets worse. Said photos from the MiniMee project were actually directly scanned from a magazine article in Haute Doll where MiniMee owners contributed their personal photos and comments about their MiniMee dolls. So, not only did Dollkot misrepresent its services, but it did so by doubly stealing: once from Haute Doll, which gave no permission for the article to be reused, and also from the MiniMee owners, whose photos and comments were reproduced on Dollkot’s Web site without permission.
To add insult to injury, their inanely cheerful response to Armeleia, one of the MiniMee owners whose photos and quotes were illegally used, implies that they thought they could get away with it. They removed the pictures, but why were they even up in the first place?
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Seems Dollkot, while stupid, might not totally be at fault, after all. The manager of Denny’s team went behind his back to Dollkot and proposed the project; it looks like it might be possible that either Dollkot didn’t know that it hadn’t been cleared with Denny, or didn’t know that he was doing it on a commercial scale.
Of course, the sneaky manager might always just be a fall guy, but we’ll have to see how it plays out. Dollkot’s never been a terribly popular company outside of Kiss, and they might have made a dumb grab for distinction without sussng out the situation.